Education
and Consulting Help Maximize the Value of
Enterprise Portals
Building
an EP solution is like building a house, and Sybase can function as the contractor
that puts everything together and ensures that the house is completed as the
customer envisioned
By Scott Swink
Organizations of all sizes-established enterprises just entering the e-Business realm or dot-com startups conceived from the beginning to be Web-based-are gravitating to enterprise portals (EPs). They see them as a way to collect and leverage demographic data, stay close to their customers and suppliers in real time, and streamline their operations-among other anticipated benefits. When successfully deployed, an enterprise portal can quickly deliver these and many other benefits to companies and their customers via the Web.
But companies may be inclined to think of their enterprise portal mainly as a point of contact on the Web. As this month's cover story, "Bring a Smart, Nonstop, Anywhere Portal Online," explains, however, an enterprise portal is more than an attractive opening into a Web site.
Although the term portal may conjure up a vision of a door, Sybase believes that an enterprise portal is more aptly compared to the framework that surrounds and includes the door. An enterprise portal is a complete IT infrastructure-not just a user interface-that integrates information from all areas of an enterprise and tailors it according to the individual needs of the person who is accessing it on the Web.
Enterprise portals empower all users connected to an organization-customers, partners, vendors, and employees-by making it easier for them to conduct e-Business and ensuring that the right information goes to the right person at the right time.
"The Sybase definition of an enterprise portal is more comprehensive than most," says Diane Davidson, vice president of Sybase Worldwide Education Services. "We have every stage of portal development, from the back-end application-integration piece to the enterprise application service piece to the Web front end."
Davidson notes, though, that establishing a true enterprise portal is an ambitious and comprehensive undertaking. It involves not only end-to-end integration, as she points out, but also an understanding of the value of EPs and how to continuously use them to maximum advantage.
Today, no one would dispute the value of the Internet and the Web to businesses. As a business tool, though, the Web is fairly new, and EPs are even newer. Despite its obvious advantages, the Web has highlighted a potential impediment to businesses looking to take advantage of all it has to offer, including EPs.
Many companies do not have the expertise in-house to implement an enterprise portal from scratch and run and maintain it. A retailer, for example, needs to concentrate on retailing-not on planning, building, and hosting a transactional Web site or an enterprise portal. Most companies need assistance in establishing their enterprise portals and then using them for business advantage.
Building an EP solution can be likened to building a house. You need an architect, a general contractor, and all kinds of building materials. Sybase can function as the contractor that puts the whole house together and ensures that it is completed as the customer envisioned it.
Sybase has spent the last decade laying the foundations for today's enterprise portals. "It's a natural extension of our experience in information exchange, particularly middleware and replication technology," says Bill Oakes, vice president of Sybase Worldwide Professional Services. "As an organization, we have a history of integrating data from mainframes; managing data movement; creating enterprise-wide architectures; and working with application servers and Web servers, enterprise-resource-planning (ERP) applications, electronic data interchange (EDI)-and of course, always the latest technologies and industry standards for data interchange, such as Java, XML, and CORBA.
"Originally," adds Oakes, "a portal was a port, a place that allows people to exchange information, to go from one place to another. Based on this definition, we've actually been building portals for years-they were just never called that. We always had open database connectivity (ODBC) and application-programming interfaces (APIs)."
Over the last few years, Sybase has completed many complex de facto portal projects, including the portal for the World Cup Soccer site, a portal solution for managing data movement for the New York Department of Health, and many other solutions.
To bolster its years of portal experience and formally apply it to EPs, Sybase is taking a two-pronged approach to meeting customers' EP needs. To help customers plan their enterprise portal, Sybase Education Services offers a specialized EP curriculum; to assist in the EP's implementation, consultants in the Sybase Professional Services organization provide the required expertise .
The Role of Professional Services and Education
Sybase's approach to EP consulting varies, depending on the needs of the customer. For traditional customers, Sybase EP development specialists in the Professional Services Group analyze their current IT systems and then transition the customers from an offline to an online model. And for dot-com customers, EP development specialists leverage years of industry knowledge about back-end systems and the operational processes required to achieve rapid, scalable growth with high availability. In concert with Sybase Worldwide Education Services, Sybase Professional Services delivers solutions for every aspect of EP implementation.
Davidson stresses the importance of a practical versus a theoretical approach to EP education. "We offer a complete EP curriculum," she says, "and it's role-based, in that you need to learn only what you are functionally responsible for."
She believes that EP education is so important that eventually vendors will offer EP certification programs, much as they now offer certification in product expertise. Currently, she notes, Sybase customers "can choose the Sybase EP Certification Program and become a certified EP developer. I don't believe that anyone else is offering this type of certification," she says.
Leading the Way
Sybase leads customers through the process of creating an EP solution, using the Sybase Advanced Framework to Enable Enterprise Portals (SAFE EP), a proven, step-by-step consulting approach. SAFE EP brings customers foresight gained from experience and best practices for EP development: The how, what, where, when, and why are all laid out in advance. Customers are assured that their EP project plan leaves nothing out and that they will have a complete view of the amount of progress, with deliverables in each phase of implementation, quality reviews, and testing all being well defined.
Sybase Worldwide Education Services makes sure customers are ready and able to fully participate in the SAFE EP process. A foundation class focuses on exactly what the Sybase enterprise portal consists of and how it functions and then, more generally, on potential business benefits and the state of the overall portal marketplace. Modular, follow-on courses meet the needs of system and Web architects, Web GUI or content developers, application developers, system administrators, and security administrators.
Personalization Makes the Difference
In the foundation class, customers learn the importance of information personalization to an EP solution. Unlike a public Web portal, which searches the entire Internet and returns thousands and thousands of hits-most of which aren't relevant-an enterprise portal returns only the right information and presents it in a format suitable for the requester. This makes an EP solution much more complex than a public Web portal. It's a sophisticated, intelligent, integrated search engine.
For example, employees in a company's financial group may request financial data no one else should see. They might also need that financial data presented in specific ways, with the ability to manipulate and explore the data. On top of that, individual employees are likely to have their own preferences about how they want to interact with financial data.
The enterprise portal has to provide right information in the right way for every organization in the company. Sybase Professional Services consultants do the up-front work, the requirements gathering, to understand exactly what each customer organization needs and where the data comes from. They also define how data will be served to end users. In addition, they specify how to make the enterprise portal "intelligent" so that it reviews what a customer requested last time and responds accordingly. Over time, personalization improves as metrics collected from requester activity all feed back into a database.
All this up-front work is reflected in the back-end integration of systems. Having defined what the individual solutions should be, Sybase truly understands how to integrate all aspects to deliver the information and applications each employee needs in order to be fully productive.
Outside Perspective
Another Professional Services task comes under the heading of classic consulting. Portals, like Web sites, require participation and agreement from executive management and all participating organizations. It takes someone with an outside perspective to mediate, establish specific cross-organizational rules, and bring everything together into a shared solution. Sybase Professional Services functions as a single point of contact and a single interface for developing a portal solution.
Stepping Up to a Whole Solution
Pointing to the importance of an enterprise portal as an integrated solution, Oakes says, "Our goal is a high-value business solution rather than just a correctly functioning set of portal products. We view Sybase EP products as the foundation for building solutions that work for the customer."
The Sybase enterprise portal works across all the systems in an enterprise, from the data center to the desktop, including portable and wireless devices, which make the portal ubiquitous. Because of this complexity, customers need Sybase in order to step up to a whole-enterprise solution. They are looking to Sybase to provide technical breadth and depth so they can transform Sybase EP products into enterprise-scale portal solutions. Sybase Professional Services responds to these needs by filling the role of master contractor, whereas Worldwide Education Services serves as teacher and facilitator. Together, they provide customers with certified EP architects, project managers, developers, and processes and best practices, based on in-depth knowledge of the latest technologies and standards.
"We bring customers our understanding of how to build enterprise-scale architectures for information exchange," says Davidson. "Professional Services and Worldwide Education Services add value incrementally every step of the way. We possess in-depth knowledge about the IT industry and portal-enabling technologies. And we track and adhere to the latest standards, so we can accommodate emerging technologies flexibly."
"I believe that Sybase has the best portal technology out there," concludes Oakes. "By extension, there is no one better for helping companies take advantage of that technology than Sybase."
Scott Swink is an independent writer and consultant.