Web Portals Expand to Include Functional Content

By Maria Trombly | Securities Industry News | July 14, 2003

When Internet portals first came on the scene in 1999, Wall Street firms immediately saw how they could be useful-but it wasn't until recently that firms began putting the technology into practice. UBS PaineWebber has been experimenting with portals, as has Merrill Lynch, Oppenheimer Funds and other Wall Street firms.

A Web portal differs from a normal Web page in that the Web page looks the same to every visitor. A portal, by comparison, can offer different information and functionality. For example, my.yahoo.com is the most famous, and most used, example of a portal on the Internet. I have mine set to show the movie listings in my area, each evening's television schedule for my favorite channels, financial news headlines and the lowest published rates on plane tickets to Paris.

Obviously, Yahoo! can't possibly create a unique welcome page for every single one of its visitors. Instead, it uses portlets, or modules, that users can assemble themselves. This is the same principle at work in corporate portals, though the assembly can be done by the company instead of the user.

Each module can be a high-powered application in and of itself-a news server, for example, an airline ticket price search engine or a movie listing. In an enterprise context, modules can be employee-facing applications from human resources, collaboration tools such as e-mail, instant messaging or virtual meeting facilities, and even trading systems and other workplace tools.

Each employee can have a portal customized to his or her needs, or get a ready-made one based on job description. Similarly, customer-facing portals can offer tools and data to corporate and retail customers.

At UBS PaineWebber, according to Catherine Susch, corporate VP of firm-wide architecture, the firm's wealth management division has been experimenting with a portal-like application to learn what the business benefits of portals would be, as a first step.

"It's arrived, it's part of life now," said Shaw Lively, an analyst with International Data Corp. based in Framingham, Mass. "Employee portals have become ubiquitous. At first, it was informational, and then it was transactional, so that as an employee you can do certain things for yourself. First, from an HR perspective, then, you can do things with your colleagues worldwide."

However, Lively added that spending has slowed somewhat because of the economy.

"I don't think people have abandoned portals," he said. "My sense is that people still believe there will be another level of payoffs from some of the things that portals enable -like collaboration, like knowledge management. But it's not a slam-dunk, no-brainer, quick-hit. It takes human capital resources and organizational-level investment to make it pay off."

It's a hot technology, added Laura Ramos, director of enterprise portals at Forrester Research, and consistently ranks as one of the top five spending areas of 2003. "It's part of a transition to a collaborative business platform," she said.
This is what John Knightly, senior director of financial services marketing at San Jose, Calif.-based BEA Systems, calls "process portals." BEA is the maker of the popular WebLogic development platform.

"A year or two ago, a portal was just the user interface for an online site," he said. "You come here to do your online trading or banking. But today we're seeing an evolution to a process portal-not only do I come here to do one thing around one product in one channel, but I'm enabled for an end-to-end business process that supports multiple applications."

Take, for example, equities research, he said. "I want to be able to come in, read my reports from my sell-side analysts, get e-mail and voice mail from the analysts, look at particular investments I'm considering and collaborate with other fund managers also looking at those same investments, make my decisions and execute trades. Those are discrete steps in a process. You can surface within one portal to get all the functionality needed to address the entire process."

Third-party content and functionality also plays a big role in today's portals, he said.

Web services standards, which allow applications to talk to each other regardless of what platform they're on or what language they're written on, are important here. Oppenheimer Funds, for example, is a BEA WebLogic customer that's using Web services as a way of integrating in third-party research content, third-party datafeeds and sell-side research. Previously, the information came through e-mail, file transfers or physical hard copies.

Meanwhile, portals are also getting more robust. According to Knightly, BEA WebLogic portals are already being used to support multiple locations.

"We have a couple of different financial services institutions that are using WebLogic Portal to provide access from different countries to their online sites," he said.

Although different countries may produce their own content and publish it through the portal, each country doesn't have to create an online brokerage site from scratch, he said. "The brokerage only has to go to one place to test it, to add more servers if they're starting to scale up their volume, to test for hacking, and to have single sign-on access, rather than having to manage that it in each different country," he said.

Another growing application for portals is the construction of bridges across silos. For example, Extreme Logic, based in New York City, has created portals for more than 10 top-tier financial firms.

"Financial services firms, either through acquisitions or organic growth, have multiple divisions," said Extreme Logic practice director Christopher Paradise. "Our work is focused on taking data from different areas in the firms and providing single views on a client."

Recent technological developments, including Web services, are making it easier to include new applications in portals, he added. "Web services provide, from an application and technology aspect, a layer of integration that's easy to deal with," he said.

Meanwhile, connections to many popular software packages, such as SAP, are already available out of the box.

"If you take large back-end systems, there are many adapters for most portals for out-of-the-box integration with minimal costs," Paradise said. "That's been around for a little while, but today you're seeing a lot more of it, and a greater selection, and more plug-and-play. The initial bad rap on portals was that there wasn't a lot of plug-ins and, when there were, they weren't well developed."

That's not true anymore, he added. Portals have become so widespread and popular that vendors are careful to make sure connectors are available and up-to-date.

The tools for customizing portals have also made strides forward.

"You're have a lot of ability to create custom controls," Paradise said. "The technology has been honed in the last six months to a year."

Portals have also become better able to handle wide-scale deployments on the employee-facing side, he added. Previously, a company might have an HR portal, or a division-level portal, with a limited number of users, sites and applications.

"The technology is there now to support a larger number of portal sites within the portal itself and a number of concurrent users," Paradise said. "In the financial services, and particularly in the larger firms, you're talking tremendous-sized companies and potentially large numbers of users accessing the portal at once."

Meanwhile, the same kind of customization and scalability has benefited institutional clients, as well.

"They want 24x7 access, and portals do fit that role," Paradise said.

Within the next year, Paradise added, he expects more collaboration technology embedded in portals, including instant messaging and videoconferencing. In addition, he said, he expects to see more enterprise application integration in the back end.

However, some applications, such as trading, are not necessarily ready to move into portals just yet, he said. "You might be able to view the history of trades, or the data supporting the trades, but I don't see trading functionality itself being embedded into these portals," he said.

There are also other ways in which portals are not a panacea for all business ills.

"Seventy percent of problems occur when there's no good business case determined for the portal," said Forrester's Ramos.

"Portals must be aligned to business objectives," added UBS PaineWebber's Susch. "You don't start at the bottom by picking technology. Too many people too often start by picking a tool and deploying. At UBS, we wanted to understand what the business value would be and make sure there is a real value for the aggregation and integration. We went forward with custom developing a portal-like approach to make sure it has a real advantage. It is a first step, and is really capturing the understanding from the business side of where the value is."

In addition, she said, a company has to be able to measure results.

"You really need to have the understanding of what to measure ahead of time," she said. "If you believe that there's going to be operational efficiency, you need the tools in place to be able to measure it."