Gartner sees many vendors, such as IBM, Microsoft, and Oracle expanding more and more into the Suite side of the market.  There are also emerging vendors in Suite side, including Adobe and Cisco.  On the lean side, we see vendors such as Liferay, Backbase, Drupal and DotNetNuke.

One of the key points I got out of Gene’s talk is to understand the ethos, or character, of the various vendor products.  Gene offers the following ethos for each vendor.

• Vendor -> Ethos
• Adobe -> Customer
• Cisco -> Collaboration
• IBM -> Customer; Employee
• Oracle -> Business Apps/Process
• MS -> Collaboration
• SAP -> Business Apps/Process

The ethos doesn’t mean that a vendor can’t play in another space, but it may be more challenging.

Gene offers the follow strategies to address UXP in the future:

• Take inventory of portal and portal-like technologies and efforts in your enterprise
• Establish governance early, including processes, teams and executive sponsorship
• Improve design processes as precursor to UXP adoption
• Gather Feedback from stakeholders
• Capitalize on widget and gadget integration via RESTful approaches
• Plan for an onslaught of mobile requirements
• Verify Alignment with Portal Vendor strategies
• Devise a framework and establish standards to address ongoing portal and UXP initiatives.
• Look at new sourcing strategies: buy  vs build vs hosting vs cloud

I asked about how Web Content Management vendors play in the UXP arena.  Gene responded that Personalization is really at the heart of a UXP.  Personalization is something portals do very well.  If you have a content management system that also does a good job of personalization, then that could be the basis of an excellent UXP platform.  See Adobe for an excellent example.  He thinks, and I agree, that we will see Web Content Management vendors becoming players in the UXP market.

• Organizations are demanding better user experiences in their portals.
• They see consumerization driving other products and want it for their portals.
• Mobile devices and the need for context-awareness are being demanded by users

What about cloud-based portals – is that in our future?  It certainly is!   Many vendors are starting to offer cloud-based portal systems. But beware!  The very nature of the portal is that it typically connects to a whole bunch of other systems in your organization behind your firewall.  So for a cloud-based portal to be effective, you will need to open up your internal systems to the cloud vendor and have some serious networking pipes. On the other hand, a cloud-based portal would be ideal to integrate your other cloud-based applications.

2015 is still a long way away, so what is happening between now and that future?  Here are the seven things that Gartner sees trending in the portal market over the next few years.

• Analytics need to be implemented to help gauge the effectiveness of the portal.  There has been a recent flurry of acquisitions in the Web Analytics market by traditional and newer portal vendors
• Portal-less Portals – there are several vendors beginning to offer portal type systems without claiming to be true portals.  Backbase is considered one of those vendors.  Adobe’s CQ5 could also qualify.
• Portal ubiquity – portals will become more ubiquitous as unbind their services
• Exploit context across more user attributes (aka enhanced personalization)
• Widgets are becoming more important and portlets less-so
• Mobile is becoming a key first consideration
• The User Experience Platform begins to emerge as a set of cohesive, pre-integrated, highly user interactive services rather than a bunch of products loosely coupled together.

Finally, in terms of vendors, we have basically three major portal vendors today:  IBM, Oracle, and Microsoft.  Close behind are our open source friends Liferay and JBoss. As the market begins to move toward this UXP concept, we are going to see lots of other vendors emerge with UXP offerings.  Firms from the content management space are beginning to move toward UXP, as are firms in the Social Software, Mashups, Portal-less Portals and other Markets.

Here are some vendors to keep your eye on over the next few years:

IBM, Oracle, Microsoft, Liferay, Redhat JBoss, Backbase, Adobe, Cisco, Google, Apple, United Planet, JackBe, NetVibes, Pageflakes, Fatwire, Extron, Automony, Drupal, DotNetNuke, Plone, Jive, Atlassian, Telligent, SocialText.