The word "portal" has become the term du jour in circles from Silicon Valley to Wall Street and beyond. Virtually everyone now using Internet technologies inside or outside the firewall integrates portal visits long or shoart into their online experience--but why has the concept of a portal becom so fascinating to those charged with charting the future information strategy for the internetworked corporation? A look at the warp-speed developments on the public Internet portals offers a set of clues to the beginnings of a radically new phase of computing which iwll literally transform organizations' use of information in the early years of the coming century.
The Delphi Group
The word that describes the strategy is "portal." It refers to a company's trying to position itself as your value-adding (and therefore fee-collecting) gateway to some place where you'll spend a lot of time and probably a lot of money. It's used mostly with reference to online services and sites on the World Wide Web: Yahoo, Lycos, AOL, and other virtual places want to be your portal to the Internet, your everyday first stop, your rabbit hole to commerce's newest wonderland, your neighborhood, and also your Virgil, your guide.
Fortune Magazine
If you are a Web merchant or would-be hub for commerce of any kind, partnerships need to be forged to cover the whole of an online transaction, from marketing to advertising to selling to fulfillment to customer service.
PC Week
