Within just a few years from the sales of the first enterprise portals they have found their way into the mainstream business world and into the minds – and often the offices – of almost every single IT department. Results of research performed by many industry and financial analysts show the rapidly growing importance of corporate portals.

By 2002 it had become clear that almost every single enterprise intends to deploy such a portal within a short period of time, if it had not already done so. Portals were on top of the list, or close to it, whenever spending plans of corporate IT departments were analyzed. Despite a negative overall economic environment, a very harsh climate in the IT industry and geopolitical tensions, within just a handful of years the enterprise portal market grew rapidly to a size of $1 billion by 2003.

As substantial as this development seems, it does not even reflect the full scope of what is happening. These $1 billion dollars are purely covering the estimated spending on licenses and maintenance. However, those cost components only account for no more than about 20% of all portal-related expenditures. In other words, by the year 2003 a new high-growth IT market had been created with a total volume of at least $5 billion dollars!