CM, Portals and Collaboration Fading: Enter 'Smart' Suite

CM, Portals and Collaboration Fading: Enter 'Smart' Suite
  
The smart enterprise suite is a new concept that integrates content management, portals and collaboration functions. Several vendors are developing the SES, which will fully emerge as a new market in 2004.
 
  
 
  

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Portals, content management and collaboration are not yet dead, but as stand-alone applications, they are fading rapidly. Many enterprises, particularly those with enterprise-level portal projects or knowledge management programs, have already integrated these three functions and others, such as e-learning and project management. Enterprises that have not begun such large-scale integration have a new opportunity to get the integrated capability without doing it themselves.

In "The Smart Enterprise Suite Is Coming: Do We Need It?" (AV-16-2189), Gartner analysts from several disciplines have come together around this exciting new development — the smart enterprise suite (SES), a technology convergence that rivals enterprise resource planning (ERP) for its potential impact on enterprise business functions. The SES is to unstructured information and knowledge as ERP is to structured enterprise data. During the next few years, as Web services technology allows for further enhancement and design around the end user, the market for the SES will grow dynamically.

Enterprises planning large-scale portal, content management and collaboration projects will face difficult choices — to buy from an SES vendor or to acquire best-of-breed capabilities from separate vendors. If for no other reason than cost, Gartner recommends that enterprises take a close look at the SES before undertaking one of these large projects. For 80 percent of the business functions in the enterprise, the SES may well satisfy 80 percent of the needs. If that's good enough, then enterprises can avoid the expense of acquiring and integrating best-of-breed.