Enterprise Portals, Blogs and RSS

David Schatsky | April 26, 2005, 12:51 PM

RSS aggregator NewsGator is entering the enterprise software arena in a sensible move to go to where the money is.

At beta sites that contemplate tens of thousands of users of the enterprise version of NewsGator, something interesting is going on. There is fertile tension between the imperatives of enterprise IT organizations, which typically prize centralized control and predictability, and RSS and blogs, which foster decentralization and whose hallmark is often serendipitous discovery.

One might even contemplate that blogs and RSS will ultimately kill off enterprise portals as we know them. But that only makes sense if portals are merely content aggregation frameworks. Portals are trying to be so much more, though, and are often deployed primarily as application integration frameworks.

The other day at the Jupiter offices, Charlie Wood, NewsGator's new VP of Enterprise solutions posited RSS aggregators as portal-killers. I say they are complementary, not substitutes. Here's Charlie's account of our meeting:

Update:: OK, one last update. I met with David Schatzky at JupiterResearch yesterday and bounced my idea of RSS aggregators as portal-killers off of him. He told me I was smoking massive dope and that enterprise portals are used by IT to consolidate apps, not deliver content. I guess we'll see. :-)