The fight against software complexity continues, but this time it's under a new name: "enterprise portal rationalization" (EPR).

This new three-letter acronym is what BEA is calling its anti-"Web sprawl" approach to leveraging the service-oriented architecture capabilities of its WebLogic Platform to help customers resolve years of fragmented portal and Web application development.

The company defines Web sprawl as "the unwieldy proliferation of custom Web applications and disparate portals that can breed complexity and high costs in enterprises today." In an offocial release it describes the situation thus:

During the late 1990s, Web-based computing and applications in the enterprise created a multitude of disparate portals and Web assets designed to serve diverse audiences, such as business operations, sales, customers, and employees. Due to the unsystematic, tactical way these Web assets were deployed, "Web sprawl" has become prolific throughout enterprises today. This sprawl can create blind spots for businesses in several crucial areas: achieving a coherent view of customer info; gaining visibility into real-time business performance metrics; and providing self service applications to customers, partners and employees. These tasks have become extremely difficult, complex and expensive due to the chaotic nature of Web sprawl. The typical results are high maintenance costs, weak governance and poor user adoption of Web applications -- the antithesis of an agile enterprise.

Accordingly IT rationalization has become a key focus of many enterprises, both on the front end and the back end.

Rationalizing hundreds or thousands of portals into either a master portal, or a discrete network of federated portals, dramatically reduces overhead and maintenance costs, says BEA. To help companies reduce the time spent on IT maintenance, it offers a standardized, platform-based SOA approach to portal development and management - based on a common set of components that can be re-used across services and applications.

"Customers have spoken," says Olivier Helleboid, BEA's EVPof products. "Complexity is contagious, wreaking havoc on their ability to achieve results through IT. BEA's philosophy is that successful software projects should result in fewer technologies not more. Our enterprise portal rationalization strategy is all about helping customers not only realize savings, but also helping them tame the out of control propagation of technology that has been the unfortunate by-product of portal proliferation."