Leading competitive response solutions company, Current Analysis, has appointed 'tier' one status to BEA, the world leader in enterprise infrastructure software. BEA was one of a total of 16 companies that Current Analysis looked at in its Enterprise Portal Market Assessment Report.

Wai Wong, executive vice president, products organization, BEA, said, "Being named a tier one vendor in the Current Analysis market assessment report is further validation of BEA's strength in the portal market. We recognize that with the rapidly changing market conditions, it is essential to provide customers with comprehensive, standards-based portal solutions. BEA WebLogic Portal is designed to help make our customer's workload significantly lighter with a simplified and controlled user experience."

BEA WebLogic Portal is designed to leverage a unified architecture with BEA WebLogic Platform to help ease portal development, integration, customization and use. BEA can help customers use IT to help increase collaboration and help manage business processes by providing a platform designed for building enterprise portals that can help to aggregate, organize, and present information from multiple back-end systems.

Current Analysis said The Enterprise Portals Market Assessment Report, provides an objective assessment of enterprise portals. The company's definition of portals is as infrastructure that can integrate an enterprise's applications, data sources and processes into a single interface for delivery to users. Their purpose is to help users perform better by giving them the applications, content and resources needed to work efficiently.

Robert Lerner, senior analyst, application infrastructure, Current Analysis, elaborated, "We developed the Enterprise Portal Market Assessment Report to better define the enterprise portal market and to provide an overview of vendors based on their ability to deliver on the presence and performance criteria that can matter most in a given market."

Current Analysis also states that "process portals and composite applications help drive adoption," noting that integrated business process management, in tandem with strong personalization and integration, is helping to drive portal implementations, and can add value by helping to enhance customer decision making and worker productivity, which can ultimately help lower costs. Current Analysis expects composite applications to be a key feature, helping to enable business users to create applications that are designed to serve their specific needs, even one-off needs.

"As vendors downsize and the mid-market continues to heat up," Lerner said, "we feel that vendors who have a strong focus on the changing technology demands and provide standards-based technology rank higher in our assessment than those that don't."