By Shai Agassi
President and CTO
TopTier Software
Presented by Joe Zarb
Executive Vice President
TopTier Software
TopTier Software, Inc.
6203 San Ignacio Ave., Suite 240
San Jose, CA 95119
Telephone: 408.360.1700
Fax: 408.360.1703
www.toptiersw.com
Recently, during a customer visit, I overheard the following… Completing a phone call from an automobile loan customer shopping for a better interest rate, a customer service representative remarked, “If only I could get my hands on a complete profile of all account relationships real time. I could have given her a better rate by linking loan payments to her checking account. We would have kept the loan and impressed the customer with the convenience of one-stop shopping.”
The bank had all the information customer support needed. But, the ability to access an integrated customer profile from 12 disparate customer databases around the country was not yet available. Not until, that is, the CFO estimated the value buried in loan revenue losses and poor customer retention to reveal the astounding bottom line significance in shareholder value. The upside opportunity of putting integrated data access in the right hands was now on corporate radar – somewhere near the top.
Missed opportunities like the bank’s are being played out every day in companies that span a broad list of other industry sectors that include insurance, retail distribution, telecommunications, healthcare, manufacturing and transportation. And, the drive behind initiatives to correct the problem isn’t just coming from IT managers. It’s coming from the top.
Corporate leaders who haven’t focused on managing the flood of information that is beginning to overwhelm users at their desks are already behind. Those who have taken the leadership role are modeling their corporate Web-based intranet systems after consumer portals like Yahoo! and Excite. IT visionaries who help workers search, extract, organize and analyze data are calling these powerful intranets Enterprise Information Portals (EIPs).
But, the biggest barriers to successful enterprise portals aren't technological. They’re organizational and human, many users say. Although the latest way to capitalize on innovations in knowledge management has technology as its base, it is seldom an organization's IT department that will solely lead an EIP initiative. It actually makes more sense for the business side of a company to handle that responsibility, with IT in charge of implementation. Also, EIP bridges organizational silos and empowers employees at all levels.
Every CEO in America should be asking his staff "what are we doing about our EIP?"
Enterprise Information Portals (EIP) are an explosive software category – a new way for IT departments to deliver relevant data and cross-application access to users at their desktops.
Clearly, unlocking the vast wealth of knowledge stored in enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems, Web sites, data warehouses, legacy mainframes, and client/server systems should top the list of competitive initiates in every major corporation today. This is one of the most powerful sources of competitive advantage available.
In their most ambitious embodiment, enterprise portals represent the latest evolution of intranets from sites that offer mostly static job-support and human-resources data into starting points for managers and knowledge workers to access real-time and historical information from internal applications, legacy databases, and the Internet – all from their desktop "browsers".
Until recently, the capability to join disparate data sources and make them available across enterprises in an organized, personalized, secure, and searchable fashion was not readily available. EIPs are designed to pull together the various strategic facets of an organization. They provide a window into enterprise knowledge by unifying and then liberating previously dormant information for comparison, analysis and sharing – so that users can leverage information that is already there and discover new insights.
There are now innovative software products that draw content from internal and external sources of structured and unstructured data. Sources include Web sites, news feeds, business documents, legacy databases and enterprise resource planning systems. The software can also facilitate collaboration by automatically grouping people with similar interests and enabling document sharing. And, most significantly, the most advanced solution links dissimilar applications, content, and workflow processes allowing users to “go anywhere.” They effectively function like an off-road vehicle for the desktop.
Of course, compiling data from multiple sources isn't a new concept. Many technology tools - data mining, data warehousing, knowledge management, business intelligence, even the much-hyped but little-used executive information and decision support systems of the 1980s tried to do just that. What's new with second-generation portals is the ease of use of a browser-inspired interface, and the availability of innumerable new data sources and “drag and relate” navigation options.
It seems everyone is trying to create a Web site that is compelling enough to become your home page and the door through which you enter the Internet. But, Internet Portals are little more than doors through which you pass on your way to something else.
On the other hand, an Enterprise Portal is the destination. Easy to get to, but with a rich culture.
The real benefit of enterprise portals has yet to be realized. But if the growth and success of consumer portals on the Web is any indication, realizing those benefits may not be far away.
By creating EIPs, companies can extend the benefits gleaned inside the company – and its ERP investment - to the outside. They can cement customer and supplier relations, coordinate workflow, extend collaboration, and increase transactions with other progressive companies.
Linking such companies and their ERP data through their EIPs, according to the experts, puts into place a linchpin of broadly based, automated, transactional Internet commerce -- the holy grail of the wired world.
Analysts also point to "information-multiplier" effects, where the more information you manage to control and exploit, the more opportunity there is to stumble into new ways of using it. EIPs enable companies to realize the fullest potential of their ERP system and to leverage their relationships with other legacy and custom data sources.
As intranets extend their reach into more and more corporate data, using intranets without a portal may become as frustrating as seeking a library book without an electronic card catalog. Given the recent birth of most corporate intranets, however, many companies have not yet deployed sophisticated interfaces, search engines or ventured beyond the basic tools that come with their servers, analysts say. But that will likely change as companies adopt portals as their core application platform.
To gain the benefits hoped for from the Internet, companies need an integrated computing platform that serves internal and external customers seamlessly through a common gateway that provides true personalization, easy publishing, and rich analysis – not just browsing and searching.
The new breed of universal EIP interface gives end users a simple yet powerful way to access, query and report on the information they rely on every day – without getting involved with underlying relationships and schemas. Navigation is an intuitive matter of simply dropping records from one object onto another. By simply dragging and relating, information can be cross-correlated and recombined in new, enlightening ways for enhanced decision support.
As corporate leaders race to gain competitive advantage by providing every decision-maker in their enterprise with the means to search, customize and act on information, the demand for new software solutions is heating up.
While the consumer portals like Yahoo and Excite offer a viable model for creating corporate knockoffs, most simply deliver access to selected information on a customized Web page. They fall short of offering the robust functionality required for decision-making by those who can add value to an enterprise.
Again, the hyper-relational and drag and drop properties of an EIP product suite are essential.
Every firm needs to get new applications into production quickly, incorporate best-of-breed programs, expand supplier and customer relationships, assimilate mergers and acquisitions and move information beyond traditional relational constraints.
Here's a pervasive case in point: Just about anybody who comes into contact with ERP applications usually winces at first site of the cumbersome user interfaces. The fundamental reality within most IT organizations is that ERP is only of one many production systems that they need to link their decision-support tools. So no matter how good a vendor’s data-warehouse initiative is down the road, the reality is that relying on an ERP company for powerful, cross-platform decision-support tools is simply not practical. Business intelligence is a separate IT discipline apart from running production systems.
To effectively leverage ERP data and juxtapose it against information from other sources, IT organizations need to look beyond traditional suppliers of “decision-support” tools toward the wave of new corporate portals.
Indeed, the EIP market is expected to soon overtake the fast-growing and much-hyped Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) market itself. Merrill Lynch estimates the total EIP market will grow from $4.4 billion in 1998 to more than $14 billion by 2002. Other analysts peg the market at upwards of $25 billion within three years. It has already eclipsed the Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) category that is in the early- to mid- stage of maturity.
By 2001, more than 50% of enterprises will incorporate an intranet portal as the predominant enterprise method for accessing cross-enterprise and internet resources according to Gartner Group.
While ubiquitous Internet portal sites such as Netscape and Yahoo battle for consumer traffic, a growing number of businesses are adapting the portal's gateway-to-the-world model as an efficient way for their employees to access critical information. The concept is so powerful that software vendors throughout the industry are rushing to deliver “portals”, or at least slap the label on all manner of products and services. That means not only lots of options, but also plenty of confusion. Users will need to balance the need for quick delivery with well-researched buying decisions.
It's a wild west scenario, with the usual protagonists and antagonists poised for riches or failure – or both. The EIP trend is expected to spark a massive wave of merger and acquisition activity across the decision-support spectrum as major companies look to integrate data warehouses, data marts, and data-mining and knowledge management tools within single application suites.
The big solutions providers will partner with, license from, or acquire the small niche players that don't have the wherewithal to bring products to a mainstream market. Caveat emptor: Many EIP suppliers are start-ups with "conceptual" stage technology; the balance are more traditional middleware suppliers repackaging marketing collateral and reintroducing old approaches to exploit the current buzz.
Traditionally, enterprise-wide business intelligence systems have required multi-million-dollar investments, with significant additions in software and hardware. Now, companies can develop solutions that deliver business intelligence to thousands of empowered managers for the cost of the software alone, using the IT infrastructure and desktops already in place. This is the next big thing.
EIPs are a new genre of application functionality. "Hyper-Relational" and "Multidimensional Knowledge Discovery" are what comes next – beyond HTML and XML, etc. Most organizations (especially their IS departments) are much less familiar with multidimensional technologies than they are with relational. It’s time to get it.
As enterprise portals gain momentum, they lend credence to predictions that Windows might be replaced as the standard desktop interface to access data from any IT source and the Web. Portals will be the next big user interface – the platform on which future business operations will be built.
What differentiates portals from their simpler relatives, Windows and browsers, is their ability to incorporate data from multiple sources in multiple formats and organize it into a single, easy-to-use menu with dynamic navigation and reporting tools.
Early adopters are demonstrating that Enterprise Information Portals deliver bottom line results.
Properly implemented EIPs are already helping companies cut costs and generate added revenues, which is a potent and attractive mix. Early adopters are demonstrating that Enterprise Information Portals deliver bottom line results.
They significantly reduce the total cost of ownership of existing technologies, deliver an unprecedented return on assets, yield a quantifiable return on investment, increase productivity and improve the quality of service.
Shai Agassi co-founded Top Tier Software in 1996 and is a co-inventor of Top Tier’s patented HyperRelational Technology. Agassi is the company’s visionary responsible for the long term technical and business model’s aspects and direction. His responsibilities also include setting priorities and objectives for the technology adoption, partnership goals, and internal product development plans for the long term.
Prior to founding Top Tier Software, Agassi co-founded two other software companies: Quicksoft, a leader in the Multimedia development marketing and distribution market in Israel and Menahel, Inc., the leader in the Windows Mid-Market Accounting software in Israel. Both of these companies focused on dissemination and visualization. Agassi also served as a computer engineer in the Army Intelligence Corps in Israel. In this role he was responsible for developing mission critical databases for military use.
Agassi holds a Bachelor’s degree in computer science from the Israel Institute of Technology.