These days, if recent government buys are indicative, the software technology is on a major upswing again.

“Portals in the federal space have been very much static. They’ve been very publication-oriented,” said Jason Smith, vice president of the federal team at Vignette. “The government has been behind in this regard. The trend now is in interaction. There’s kind of been a sea change in what the portal is supposed to do to generate business value.”

One motivation for the renewed interest is automation, as high-volume, customer-service-oriented agencies, such as the IRS and Citizenship and Immigration Services, try to reduce call-center volume and shorten response times.

Through the looking glass

Corporate acquisitions and other financial trends followed suit, with many pure-play vendors going under or merging (to wit: Vignette’s purchase of Epicentric), and development vendors gobbling up others. This evolution has left just a handful of vendors (see product listing) whose portal offerings are comprehensive enough to meet government specs.

For example, BEA Systems Inc. bought Plumtree, renaming Plumtree’s product line under its own AquaLogic brand name.

“The BEA AquaLogic portal is still probably the best all-around portal in overall functionality and track record in sophisticated deployments,” said Ray Valdes, a Gartner research director. BEA counts the Defense Finance and Accounting Service among AquaLogic users.

In the past year or so, portal projects have become almost a stand-in for the Web “e-gov” projects of several years ago, as agencies have come to realize that putting a pretty front end before constituents requires a new, Web standards-based Service Oriented Architecture behind it. Now portals are more than just a feature, but a catch-all term for agency efforts to realize the Web’s potential as a communication medium.