Portals provide a personalized window into the enterprise and provide users access to relevant information. A typical portal has a combination of portlets on a single Web page, providing the user with access to multiple information sources at one time. The information displayed in portlets is assembled from several applications or systems. To provide the most appropriate, timely, and relevant information, real-time connectivity to various systems is required, so integration technology has become key to the success of enterprise portal solutions. Integration solutions offer back-end connectivity and data transformation to a range of systems, including packaged applications and mainframes, and technologies such as messaging. In addition, portal solutions are incorporating other integration technologies such as Business Process Management (BPM), which enables automation of steps that define end-to-end business processes.

Portals at the Breaking Point
Although portlets offer tremendous benefits in terms of information access and delivery, the manner in which enterprise portals are currently built and implemented can limit flexibility and thus hamper their long-term business benefits.

First-generation-portal vendors implemented portlets by building a point-to-point bridge between the application and the portal. These bridges were often hard-coded and relied on simple data-to-portal integration tools. Because organizations have deployed numerous packaged and homegrown applications, most of which were not designed for interoperability, this type of portal integration was inflexible. As a result, when new applications were deployed, organizations had to perform additional coding and administration to connect to additional information sources, resulting in unnecessary portal downtime.

To address these limitations, portal vendors have developed enterprise portal solutions that connect seamlessly with an integration layer, which performs translation, transformation, and BPM to connect disparate systems, thus moving away from point-to-point connectivity. In figure 1, the portlets in the portal connect only to the integration layer and do not require direct connectivity to a specific application. Based on the information request, the BPM layer decides which application to tap and how to route specific data and present it to users via a portlet. The translation and transformation layer, which knows how the data is mapped to different back-end applications, taps the specific application adapter for connectivity. This current generation of portals enables transparent access to end-to-end business processes, which further improves the flow of information across the enterprise.