The consultants are, however, not the only companies to provide corporate portal services. The biggest portal of them all, Yahoo, has also announced a big push into the corporate portal market where it hopes to generate bundles of cash. Corporate Yahoo, as it is known, allows businesses to customise the Yahoo portal to their own ends. For a charge, businesses can integrate their own databases, intranets and applications, such as human resources, with a Yahoo-style front end which will also allow access to the internet. Andersen Consulting was touted as one of the first big users when a joint deal was announced with the US state of North Carolina for a portal based on Corporate Yahoo.
Projects are also under way in Florida, Texas and Wyoming.
Other big firms with long fingers in the corporate portal pie include Hewlett Packard, Oracle and the ubiquitous Microsoft, each of whom offer the usual integration services while claiming that theirs is the best solution before they start partnering with each other to make it work. Other early summer announcements came from the corporate portal specialists such as US firm Open Market. Our proven experience with portal and marketplace business models gives us a unique advantage over the competition, said Ron Matros, president and CEO of Open Market. We have portal and marketplace customers who are succeeding right now. Building upon our knowledge, we have partnered with industry leaders offering community technology and portal development services to meet the business needs of portals and marketplaces integrated content, community and commerce, an open standards-based architecture, flexible business models and speed to market.