News

IDC: Portals Follow Intranets

• 01/22/2001

By the end of 1999, two-thirds of U.S. organizations with more than 10 employees had intranets. By 2001, 50.7 percent of these organizations plan to have corporate portals installed, according to IDC's Technology Integration Panel Study (TIPS).

Not surprisingly, larger companies are more likely to have intranets than smaller companies. In general, companies devote more of their intranet spending on internal resources than on external products and services, according to Extending Information Throughout the Enterprise: Portals, Browsers, and Intranet Adoption Trends, (IDC23207, December 2000).

In addition to content, accessing applications through browsers is becoming more popular. More than 62 percent of companies in the TIPS survey said they used browsers to access corporate applications in 1999, and 79 percent said they expected to do so by yearend 2000.

In both 1999 and 2000, the top applications areas for access by Web browsers were:

• Groupware
• Customer support
• Sales and marketing

By 2001, half of the corporations surveyed expected to have corporate portals installed, up from 18 percent in 1999. Again, the larger firms were more avid adopters. By the end of 2000, the communications sector had the highest percentage of respondents with corporate portals, followed by the financial services sector.

Every year, there is a cluster of industries in which more than 30 percent of respondents were implementing or plan to implement their corporate portals.

In 1999, the early adopters were the communications sector, "other services" and government. In 2000, the process manufacturers and business/legal services sector were adopting portals. In 2001, the mining/agriculture/ construction sector will be very active, as will health and engineering/management services.