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Portals signal death of the corporate intranet

By Pia Heikkila

Published: Monday 21 August 2000

The uptake of corporate portals will mean the end of intranets, because they allow staff to personalise information more readily.

The claim came from Michael Crosno, MD of US-based portal specialist, Epicentric, in an exclusive interview with silicon.com late last week.

According to Crosno, several large US corporates, including Bank of America, have already implemented business-to-employee (B2E) portals as their main information platform.

"The early adopters are moving to advanced portal networks, which are replacing corporate intranets. Their personalisation will bring increased productivity," he said.

Analyst house Ovum has predicted massive growth in corporate portals, but David Wells, senior analyst at Ovum, does not believe they will proliferate at the expense of intranets.

"Portals amplify the value of corporate intranets by making them more effective and attractive to use. The intranet will be supporting the corporate portal and will act as an underlying infrastructure rather than make it disappear," Wells said.

One of the main attractions of a corporate portal is its personalisation and design ability, which analysts claim will be the driving force behind web-enabled communication.

Ian Wells, MD of European portal company Mediapps, said corporate portals will simplify the desktop. "Companies will be adopting the portal technology as it may replace the top heavy desktop applications as a more personalised user friendly interface in an ASP delivery format. It may also deliver all the applications required through one browser," he added.

Ovum's Wells said: "It is easy to add the most important functionality first to a corporate portal, then add any other features later on so you can build it to suit the users needs and it can grow as the company grows."