That was the blunt warning with which Iona Technologies' co-founder and chief technology officer Annrai O'Toole opened the middleware pioneer's first European user conference in Dublin last month. If you do not have an enterprise portal you will not be here in three years time.
Enterprise portals allow businesses to put their internal systems online.
Eight years after its debut as a low-level middleware vendor, Iona is hoping its new iPortal suite of development and integration tools for building enterprise portals will make it a market leader. Iona is not alone in spotting the portal trend. Last week IBM announced the Enterprise Integration Portal, which is based on its Content Connect toolset and DB2 database. In September, Oracle announced an equivalent strategy, while Sun is tackling portals with its iPlanet products from the Sun-Netscape Alliance. A host of smaller vendors such as DataChannel, Navant and Viador have also launched products.