BEA Systems has released its annual report on the state of the enterprise portal market. The new report “State of the Portal Market 2007: Portals and The Power of Participation” synthesizes original research, market, and custom survey data into a densely packed analysis of this vibrant market. The report reveals that portals remain a top priority for CIOs at large enterprises for the sixth consecutive year. It also substantiates industry consensus that portals remain ideal platforms for consolidating applications, helping enable the integration and reuse of existing systems and data, and helping companies introduce Web 2.0 capabilities and social computing technologies to their increasingly tech-savvy user communities.

The BEA report features survey data on deployment and adoption patterns gathered from more than 540 BEA portal customers and synthesizes over 100 analyst reports and industry articles covering the portal and allied markets in the past twelve months. The report incorporates independent analysis and industry trends into a comprehensive perspective of real-world deployment practices, trends and ROI anecdotes for portal technologies. This original study is available for download exclusively at http://bea.com/whitepapers/portal-market.

Key findings in the BEA report include:

Market: The enterprise portal market continues to grow over nine percent annually, with an estimated $1.4 billion in annual sales by 2011.

Audience expansion: Despite efforts to consolidate, the number of portals deployed in an enterprise is expanding. This expansion is not necessarily due to technical limitations of software but to the increasing number of audiences being supported by portals, and by the improved flexibility of portal technology as a framework to speed application development and deployment.

Business and IT agility-BPM and SOA: The increased adoption of business process management (BPM) and service-oriented architecture (SOA) initiatives are both driving portal usage. This is because portals already utilize many SOA principles and can deliver and manage premium interaction and contextual experiences.

Business participation – Web 2.0 and the new enterprise: After witnessing the revolutionary impact of Web 2.0 companies on the consumer Web, leading-edge companies are embracing those principles for use in the enterprise. Portals are the leading vehicles for delivering Web 2.0 and enterprise social computing capabilities because of the rich user experience and interactive capabilities they offer.