Portals are becoming integral enablers of business and IT innovation for many organizations. From first-generation content aggregation portals to more sophisticated enterprise process portals, organizations have used portal solutions to improve productivity, streamline business processes, enable new Web-based product and service delivery models, and provide IT with a powerful platform for new and composite application development.
W H I T E P AP E R A n E v a l u a t i o n o f B u i l d V e r s u s B u y f o r P o r t a l S o l u t i o n s Sponsored by: IBM Randy Perry Kathleen Quirk December 2007
I N T H I S W H I T E P AP E R This IDC white paper presents the results of an IDC study, sponsored by IBM, that moc. quantifies and compares the total cost of ownership (TCO) of in-house portal cdi. development with that of portals developed with IBM WebSphere Portal. www Data for the study was collected through 10 in-depth customer interviews with IBM 51 customers that had experience with in-house portal development as well as portal 04.5 development with WebSphere Portal. The data collected from these customers for 39. both deployment scenarios is presented to show the representative costs associated 805. with the two approaches. Key findings of the study include the following: F 00 ! WebSphere Portal–based solutions had a 29% lower five-year TCO on average 28.2 compared with in-house-developed portals. 78.80 ! 5 Labor costs to deploy portals and applications with WebSphere Portal were 38% .P lower than with in-house solutions. ASU ! Every $1.00 spent on WebSphere Portal software yielded on average $4.80 in IT 107 labor avoidance. 10 AM ! , Initial deployments of portals developed on WebSphere Portal were 45% faster ma to market than in-house-developed counterparts. hgnim ! Portal applications developed on the WebSphere Portal platform had a 78% arF faster time to market than those built for in-house portals. teertS nee S I T U AT I O N O V E R V I E W pS 5 :sr L e v e r a g i n g t h e V a l u e o f P o r t a l S o l u t i o n s etrauq Portals are becoming integral enablers of business and IT innovation for many dae organizations. From first-generation content aggregation portals to more sophisticated H la enterprise process portals, organizations have used portal solutions to improve bol productivity, streamline business processes, enable new Web-based product and G service delivery models, and provide IT with a powerful platform for new and composite application development.
A recent IDC survey found that 90% of organizations are planning to either maintain or increase their investments in portal solutions over the next 12 months (see Figure 1). The respondents cited concrete benefits from their portal projects and are now considering expansion of business portal use related to conducting collaborative operations in innovative ways. IDC found that the top business drivers for this ongoing investment center on using the portal infrastructure to automate additional business processes by taking advantage of features such as electronic forms to streamline paper-based processes, incorporating workflow capabilities, and taking advantage of composite applications or enterprise mashups to combine data in compelling new visual displays.
F I G U R E 1 L e v e l o f C h an g e i n P o r t a l S o f t w ar e I n v e st m en t i n t h e N e xt 1 2 M o n t h s Q. How will your investment in portal software change in the next 12 months?
Decrease (2.0%)Don't know (8.0%)
Increase (31.0%) Stay the same (59.0%)
n = 123
Source: IDC's 1Q07 AppStats Survey
Figure 2 shows that in addition to leveraging the portal's business process automation capabilities, survey respondents plan to take advantage of the portal's ability to deliver self-service information through dashboards, add Web 2.0 collaborative tools such as wikis and blogs, and provide information aggregation services such as business networking applications to make it easier to discover and share expertise with colleagues.
