Oracle has announced that Oracle Portal 10g, a component of Oracle Fusion Middleware, has been positioned in the Leaders Quadrant of the 2006 Gartner Horizontal Portal Products Magic Quadrant. According to Gartner, demand for horizontal portal products remains strong, driving most enterprise portal deployments. Gartner defines a portal as a "Web software infrastructure that provides access to, and interaction with, relevant information assets, knowledge assets and human assets by select targeted audiences, delivered in a highly personalized manner." Leaders in this category are performing well today, have a clear vision of market direction and are actively building competencies to sustain their leadership position in the market.

"We believe Oracle Portal's position in the leaders quadrant signifies the tremendous success our standards-based family of middleware products is experiencing," said Rahul Patel, vice president, Oracle Fusion Middleware. "Deployed as a complete platform or as individual components, Oracle Fusion Middleware delivers organizations with heterogeneous environments best-in-class middleware technologies they can use today to extend the value of their existing and future IT investments. Oracle Portal delivers a secure, personalized mechanism for all key stakeholders - employees, customers and partners to access enterprise content, view business analytics, participate in business processes and collaborate."

As companies take advantage of the benefits of Service-Oriented Architectures (SOAs), Oracle's portal technology is a key enabler for leveraging data from heterogeneous systems for use in portals and composite applications. Oracle Portal 10g is a complete and integrated framework for developing, deploying and managing enterprise portals. It enables secure information access through role-based security, self-service customization, online collaboration and a unified view into key business processes. Built on open standards, Oracle Portal is a secure, scalable and highly available portal platform for organizations to conduct business with customers, partners and suppliers.

Gartner conducted a thorough evaluation of more than 14 vendors using the following criteria:
*The vendor must have at least $5 million in annual portal-related product and service revenue during the 2005 calendar year.

*The vendor must provide sales and support for the portal product in at least two of the following five geographic regions: North America; Latin America; Europe, the Middle East and Africa; Japan; and the Asia/Pacific region.

*The vendor must have the ability to sell an enterprise portal for deployment in a variety of scenarios, including B2E, B2B and B2C.

*The vendor must provide portal functionality that meets all Generation 1 criteria, as defined in previously published Gartner materials.

The full Magic Quadrant for Horizontal Portal Products, 2006 report can be found at the following URL - http://www.oracle.com/corporate/analyst/reports/infrastructure/index.htm...