Microsoft (SharePoint), IBM and Oracle Make Gartner’s Portal Magic Quadrant

By David Roe (@druadh20) Oct 11, 2010

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For those looking to develop and implement horizontal portals, Gartner has recently published its Magic Quadrant report, which amongst other things, shows that with a shift towards Web 2.0, cloud and consumer facing portals, the number of viable vendors has dropped from more than 50 in 2003 to less than a dozen in 2010.

According to Gartner (news, site), there is increased pressure on enterprises to improve employee productivity and collaboration, as well as extend business processes and applications to wider audiences.

There is also pressure to generally improve business visibility and responsiveness, which is driving demand for portals that can manage all the different channels and all the different information they contain.

Portals and UXP

Increasingly, they span both cloud and on-premise deployments pulling together disparate information sources, as well as offering the possibly of scaling-to-needs to ensure agility.

And already, Gartner says, horizontal portals are providing the foundation for user experience platforms (UXP) that provide integration of technologies used to deliver portals, mashups, RIAs, Ajax-enabled websites, web content management and mobile applications.

Furthermore, portals are evolving with new web 2.0 technologies and while they still contain ‘traditional’ portal technologies, they also include new capabilities including social computing, analytics and business process management.

All the portal products covered in this Magic Quadrant are inherently "cloud friendly," and most are able to produce and consume Web services through portlets, widgets and r(REST)ful approaches.

Magic Quadrant Portal Leaders

So who made it into the top five? Here they are in alphabetical order.

1. IBM

IBM (news, site) has an extensive presence across all regions and industry segments. It complements its primary product, WebSphere Portal Server, with a variety of related technologies, including Lotus Web Content Management, Lotus Connections, IBM Mashup Center and Tivoli Access Manager/Identity Manager.

Strengths

WebSphere Portal Server has the widest set of portal capabilities of all the product vendors with deployments across all verticals. It has a long list of complementary technologies so there is little that can’t be done with this.

Caution

It has a very heavy software footprint and needs WebSphere Application Server as its platform. Used with other complementary products it also has a substantial code set that needs to be deployed and integrated. It can also be quite pricey for some enterprises.

2. Liferay

According to Gartner, despite the fact that Liferay Portal (news, site) is very small it is the subject of a huge number of Gartner inquiries reflecting not just its positive attributes, but also the fact that many enterprises are not happy with other commercial products that come with high costs, complexity and less-than-hoped-for business value.