The genesis of the EIP

The start of the hype about the enterprise information portal (EIP) concept has been credited to a report released on 16 November 1998 by two analysts from Merrill Lynch called Christopher Shilakes and Julie Tylman.

The report identified three important factors that would lead to the success of the new technology: organisations would realise the value of their data repositories; vendors would build solutions that would shift the burden of development off the users; and the ubiquity of intranet installations.

The passage that really made the industry sit up and take notice was a prediction that the EIP market would eventually "reach or exceed the investment opportunities provided by the Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) market". In dollar terms, Mr Shilakes and Ms Tylman estimated the corporate portal market to have been worth US$4.4 billion (AUS$6.8 billion) in sales revenue last year, reaching US$14.8 billion (AUS$22.8 billion) by 2002.

These numbers, while impressive, were actually cobbled together from several successful existing industries, which the analysts said would undergo a consolidation under the portal banner: business intelligence (Seagate, Brio, Cognos et al), content management (meaning document management vendors like PC DOCS and Documentum), data warehousing (SAS, Oracle, Sybase et al), data mining, online analytical processing (e.g. Gentia and Hyperion) and others.