Your world: What portals are and why you might need one

Web portals allow people to interact with other people, applications, processes, documents and other content in a personalized and role-based fashion. In a day and age when information overload has become commonplace, portals allow context-relevant resources to be presented through common web browsers, placing what you need to complete the job at hand at your fingertips regardless of where you are.

Why a portal might be right for your organization

Many IT solutions provide needed functionality, but require you to learn a new way to work. Portals allow you to customize your work environment to your own needs, to present resources in a consistent fashion, and can provide a personalized experience based upon your previous preferences or specific role within an organization.

In addition, portals can help organizations address the challenges inherent with ‘build your own’ web solutions, such as:

• Finding it difficult to keep up with the pace of evolution and the demand of user communities
• Needing to reduce application development resources and time to market
• Wanting to optimize the allocation of scarce IT resources, skills, and budgets

Why IBM?

In addition to leading the enterprise portal market for more than five consecutive years, IBM portals have been shown to deliver significant advantages over other ‘build your own’ solutions¹, including:

• 29% lower five year TCO on average
• 38% lower labor costs to deploy portals and applications
• $4.80 in IT labor avoidance on average for every $1 spent
• Initial portal deployments that were 45% faster to market
• Portal applications developed that had a 78% faster time to market
• 28% increase in server and application availability

¹ An Evaluation of Build Versus Buy for Portal Solutions, IDC: December 2007