"The promises of Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) further spur  portal adoptions, as many organizations see portals as either a first practical step toward SOA or a
necessary complement to other SOA infrastructure," according to BEA's annual report on the enterprise portal market. The latest report  found "that the portal market is growing again at a healthy 15 percent, and CIO surveys confirm for a fifth consecutive year that portal technology remains a strategic spending priority."

The report also made the following statements and conclusions;

* The portal market is expanding to include business process management and usage analytics technologies.
* Portal and allied technologies are putting more capabilities directly in the hands of business users, helping foster deeper alignment with information technology (IT) departments.
* In 87 percent of BEA portal deployments, costs for services were less than or equal to license fees, proving the power of the portal framework as a cost-effective way to deliver a volume and variety of Web applications.
* Portal-based composite applications that are designed to solve specific business problems can deliver rapid return on investment (ROI)—54 percent of customers surveyed report that initial deployments took fewer than six months. Customers cite benefits such as revenue growth, call center
productivity improvements, stronger supplier partnerships, and increased customer retention and loyalty.

"Since its inception in 1997, the portal market has consistently changed, expanding to encompass a wider
universe of technologies and capabilities that transform business productivity," the report states. "Companies are continuing to extend their application of portal technologies to an increasing set of sophisticated  challenges, and see the portal itself as the foundation for a larger IT strategy that involves assembling a variety
of composite applications to solve previously intractable business problems."

The report concludes, "the applications of the future may not look like today’s portals, but they will benefit from the open architecture, context-driven experience framework, and rich network of collaborative capabilities that portals initially established and continue to advance. "