The 2004 Portal Excellence Awards
Information Management Magazine, May 2004
Sponsored by DCI and DM Review
Each year, those who have implemented portals compete for the Portal Excellence Awards. At DCI's Portals, Collaboration and Content Management Conference in San Francisco in March 2004, winners were announced in two categories, Best Enterprise Portal Application and Best Business Integration Project, and awards were given to teams of both the customer and the solution provider.
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As the conference chair, I led the judges' panel for these awards. Joining me on the panel were Clive Finkelstein of Information Engineering and Zach Wahl of Project Performance Corporation. We evaluated the return on investment, architectural design and innovation of each customer implementation.
The finalists for the Best Enterprise Portal Application were: American Hospital Association and Interwoven, AXA Financial and Sun Microsystems, AXA Insurance and Sonic Software, and Hamilton Sundstrand and Plumtree Software. The winner was AXA Financial. A special award was given to the American Hospital Association for the best example of content management.
The finalists for the Best Business Integration Project were: County of Santa Clara and Datawatch Corporation, E&J Gallo Winery and TIBCO Software, Twentieth Century Fox and Alphalogix, and Wall Street Access and IBM. The winner was E&J Gallo Winery. A special award was given to the County of Santa Clara for the best example of meta data integration.
Enterprise Portal Application
AXA Financial - Winner
AXA Financial deployed the Sun Java System Portal Server for supporting its AXA Advisors retail channel (AXAonline.com) and its AXA Distributors wholesale channel (AXAdistributors.com).
Financial professionals and their clients at AXA Advisors use the portal to access information and link to tools that help them increase productivity. Financial professionals can execute securities trades online and stay current with key events for clients. Clients can manage and view their portfolios online and access an abundance of information related to financial products and services.
In 2003, 29 percent of all customer self-service financial transactions at AXA were conducted over the Internet using the portal, providing a significant savings over using a call center. AXA is able to conduct insurance transactions online at nearly half of the cost of traditional channels. The company also saves more than $600,000 annually through the elimination of mass-mailing costs.
The AXA Distributors portal leverages the success of the AXA Advisors portal by extending portal-enabled facilities to independent financial advisors, banks and broker/dealers. Approximately 90 percent of the retail portal architecture was reused in the deployment of the wholesale portal. By consolidating its e-commerce initiatives onto one platform infrastructure, AXA Financial reduced its total cost of ownership by as much as 50 percent.
American Hospital Association
Special Content Management Award
American Hospital Association (AHA) Hospital-Connect portal (hospitalconnect.com) provides a single point of access to the 50 Web sites owned by AHA and its 21 affiliates. The core of the infrastructure consists of the Interwoven content management system and a Verity search engine.
Prior to the creation of the portal, AHA and its affiliates had 72 Web sites. The challenge of managing these different Web sites on 18 different and unconnected platforms was daunting. Sharing files was difficult and search was impossible. Now, the portal enables AHA and all of its affiliates to work on standardized hardware and software in one location - a fully secure Qwest CyberCenter. Each site can share design templates and content with the other Web sites but can operate independently, thus maintaining its own look and feel.
The portal has enabled HospitalConnect to reduce development, management and print costs by tens of thousands of dollars. It has also streamlined access to information - enabling visitors to find information in seconds, as opposed to hours. Better management of content has also opened new revenue opportunities. AHA recently had its biggest year in online store sales, which were 20 percent ahead of last year and 75 percent ahead of two years ago.
AXA Insurance - Finalist
AXA Insurance has created an XML-based enterprise portal for content management, delivery and profiling called ARIA (AXA's Reusable Information Area). ARIA is based on Sonic Software's eXtensible Information Server, an XML data store and processing engine.
ARIA provides AXA Insurance employees with the ability to edit and publish their own Web content while maintaining company-branding guidelines. Currently, there are 4,500 portal users and 350 editors and publishers.
With the self-publishing of content to the portal, portal information is more accurate and appears in a more timely fashion. The time required to post information has been reduced from seven days to less than a minute. Additionally, IT staff can function more effectively, as they are relieved of the inefficient task of maintaining Web content.
ARIA has reduced overall IT costs while returning control of content to the people who should own it. Additionally, by developing its own portal, AXA Insurance has eliminated the need for a commercial content management system. This has led to savings of approximately $350,000 in the first year of operation, and a further savings of $200,000 for each subsequent year of operation.
Hamilton Sundstrand - Finalist
As the company's virtual desktop, the MyHamilton-Sundstrand (MyHS) portal is the mandatory home page for every Hamilton Sundstrand employee. The MyHS portal uses the Plumtree Corporate Portal Server for supporting 17,500 employees enterprise-wide. It consists of a 150,000-document directory, 175 workgroup communities and 350 portlets that integrate information and services from enterprise systems and the Internet. Some 900 Web crawlers scan various document repositories and index new documents within the document directory.
Through MyHS, employees have a single destination for production schedules and order status from JD Edwards, sales reports from Business Objects, company and competitor news, and project information and collaborative workspaces. As a result, the company is streamlining supply chain communication and reducing the time spent phoning, faxing and searching for information.
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