Yesterday’s post focused on the immaturity of the CMS market (Ziff Davis event shows immaturity of CMS market). Well, content management has company – the portal market is nearly as green as Steve Balmer’s face when he hears he’s lost another engineer to Google.

A recent analyst report from CMS Watch finds buyers are having troubles with their purchases. To quote analyst Janus Boye, the author of the Enterprise Portal’s Report, the portals market is struggling with a “diverse portal products target different use-cases, and customers grapple with oft-immature tools, persistent performance bottlenecks, implementation delays, cost overruns, and poor.

The report analyzes the market and 13 leading portal products including those from BEA, Microsoft, IBM and even open-source products like Plone.

Based on more than 60 interviews with enterprise portal customers and integrators worldwide, the new Enterprise Portals Report examines six use-cases: Web Publishing, Self-service, Collaboration, Enterprise Intranet, Transactional E-business, and Enterprise Integration.

Key findings include:

• Portal technology vendors target divergent use-cases, and no single platform excels across the broad spectrum of portal applications. For example, while Microsoft SharePoint Portal Server has seen tremendous growth on the strength of its Collaboration facilities, it is a comparatively poor platform for Enterprise Integration. Conversely, BEA WebLogic Portal offers strong E-business capabilities, but may not be well suited for Collaboration and Enterprise Intranet use-cases.
• Despite supplier consolidation, portal software remains a comparatively immature technology, with vendors and customers alike struggling to address chronic performance problems, usability shortcomings, and low adoption rates. While all major vendors have serious portal offerings, no dominant vendors exist.
• Several prominent products are slated for major upgrades this year. This will translate into opportunities for customers, but also disruption and potentially expensive upgrades.
• Open-source portal projects offer serious alternatives to commercial products, but tend to focus on Web Publishing and Collaboration over more Transactional use-cases.
• Portal solutions are often acquired at the senior executive level, with lukewarm welcome at departmental levels. Buyers have a hard time understanding the impact of technical and non-technical changes that a portal project introduces.

“Portal purchasers struggle with conflicting product definitions and often purchase portal technology without clearly understanding it,” says Boye. “Enterprises painfully discover that portal solutions are much less out-of-the-box than expected. Many face challenges due to misaligned requirements, underestimated implementation costs, or overestimated user adoption rates.”

"There are real differences among the various portal vendors," added Byrne, "and customers should carefully examine a product's 'fit' against their particular use-cases before committing to a portal platform."

As I wrote in my recent article The future of portals… “Portal products can be easy to use for certain functions, and lousy in others. Inconsistency is par for the course; some solutions work well some organizations and not in others. It’s important to first develop a full plan with detailed business requirements before evaluating any solution. A portal product is only a piece of technology, and technology is as only as good as the people and process that support it."