Prepare for web portals power soon to come

We are witnessing the dawn of the next major phase in IT Portals will not only change your business worlds as 'collaborative commerce' in enterprise IT becomes far more commonplace; they will also change that of your IT suppliers.

The web portals bandwagon is rolling, and as it gathers pace,

Martin Butler, self-styled manufacturing business IT guru and chairman of analyst Butler Group, reckons that "self-service", not oil, cars or even computers, was the single most important factor in driving economic change in the last century. The notion of self-service, he says, has in recent decades transformed the way we live, and today, with the latent power of the web it's accelerating that change.

He gives the example of call centres' fortunes - set up and already being torn down, as 'always on' self service consumer-to-business and business-to-business web enquiry mechanisms slash costs and increase convenience.

Make no mistake, portals will carry this transformation forward. Not portals simply as universal, browser user interfaces to information and software-these are powerful and can be cathartic, but in a sense Citrix and terminal servers can do much of that. Portals imbued with Web services, acting as a conduit, a 'process port, through which applications communicate with one another on demand, without set-up, are the key.

Web services, in the context of software interaction standards, are critical. This is what builds the potential for the creation of casually and temporarily web-connected pseudo applications. It's about gaining global 'knowledge capital'.

Butler: "What we're looking at now is a golf ball which will become the size of a whole universe." And that's without thinking about Web services as web-served application components from which we will supposedly pick and choose in true, granular 'best of breed' style.

Sounds fanciful, but it means people and systems sucking in relevant information from each other, running applications spontaneously through the port, answering queries, gaining and refining understanding and content without caring where it comes from or how it's formatted.

Far fetched? Not really - portals' speed, universality and reach of operational, workgroup and database data and apps is growing very fast.

* web keyword: portal