1. Horizontal applications: Most of the applications and tools like e-mail, newsgroups, and bulletin boards fit into this group. Today, most of these have reached a commodity pricing level and are included in other applications for a small fee. Over recent years, many have been offered free.
2. Packaged applications: Turnkey applications that perform a particular application without major modification are becoming available
for the Internet. Customer Management applications, Document
Management Systems. and Project Management systems all fall into
this category. Many of these were initially, developed for client/server
applications for local or wide area networks.
3. Web servers: The Web server is at the heart of any Web-based
application. This is where data is stored, requested, and delivered to
the appropriate applications (these are usually, browser-based).
4. Database systems and application servers: Database products
provide the information to send to Web servers and provide the transactions on the system. They are the brains of the system, where the most valuable information, trades, and transactions are taking place.
5. Security systems: The most important aspect of your e-business
solution. Without security you do not have a system, you have
a liability. Security Typically is defined at the computer, network.
users, applications, and right down to the individual Transaction.
6. Tools and other systems: Myriad other tools are involved in the
development of these systems, including authoring, maintenance,
administration, optimization, marketing, and others.
7. Portals: Another type of site that is important to many operations
today is the portal. The portal used to be viewed as a destination site
for users of a particular class. However, today many organizations
refer to their own environments as corporate portals (primal-
for B2B and B2E applications), arid other operations consider their
marketplaces to be portals. (Vertical portals are sometimes referred
to as vortals).

Lines become blurred between dedicated portals and personalized e-
business portals. The large portals that have evolved primary- from the
search engines now play a much bigger role. Incorporating shopping.
research, communities, chat and e-mail services, the battle for consumer
mindshare goes on. Despite the success of the biggest ones, such as
AOL Yahoo!, Excite, Google and Lycos, searching for relevant information still
remains a problem on the Internet that has yet to be solved.

The portal market has changed. As Web users became smarter, they
migrated to sites that offered them a more complete and relevant
experience, in the business world, we have seen the birth of another
form of portal, the corporate information portal. This allows users to
interact with information and systems relevant to the corporate world,
and is customizable to meet their needs.

At the application end of the business, new portals are being defined
based on the use of a "free" service on the Web, such as e-mail or
Calendaring. These features are now common on large portals such as
Yahoo!, Google and Lycos. (However. the free may be going out of some of
these services before too long).

There is no question that the portal marketplace and what is means
to us continues to change. As more companies with a presence on the Internet understand that content is one of the most important issues that continues to bring visitors back to their site. content-rich sites will continue to thrive. The vertical portal, focused on industry groups, has been one of the fastest growing sections of the marketplace. If you want to stay abreast of activities in your industry, watch this space carefully. The vertical portals are going to change the way that business is done particularly for partnership creating and business networking.

As you embark on the e-business road, consider the various elements and waypoints for your journey. There are many variables in this marketplace, and a continuously changing landscape. The trip will be exciting. Picking partners is however, only one part of the process. First. we need to take a deep breath and ready ourselves for the largest challenge of all. Change.