IBM's recent acquisition of portal-development-tools supplier Bowstreet Inc. highlights how portals increasingly are being put to work as integration tools. But the popularity of portals underlines just how reluctant companies are to spend a lot of money moving from legacy systems to the service-oriented architectures that IT vendors tout as the future.
Portal technology is increasingly winning favor as a way to minimize custom coding, integrate disparate applications and data sources, and even develop small-scale service-oriented architectures. Fifty-three percent of companies have intranet or internal portals on their IT project lists this year, according to Information-Week Research's Outlook 2006 survey of 300 business-technology professionals.
