The Portal Wars Are Back

And This Time, the Stakes Are Higher Than Ever.

The next wave of digital transformation in enterprise and government won’t be fought over isolated applications or standalone automation efforts. The real battle is over portals. That’s right, portals.

At first, it might sound like a throwback to the early 2000s, when businesses and governments first ventured into the digital world with clunky intranets and static dashboards. But this isn’t nostalgia. This is a reinvention. This isn’t just history repeating. It’s a fundamental shift.

Portals are no longer just front doors to fragmented applications. They are becoming the control layer and foundation for workflow automation, AI-driven experiences, and enterprise-wide orchestration. This time, thanks to PaaS, portals aren’t just about accessing systems. They are about how organisations will build, automate, and scale their entire digital ecosystems.

Lessons from the Last Portal War: IBM vs. Microsoft

The battle for the modern portal layer isn’t unprecedented. To see what’s at stake, we need only look back at the last time, when IBM and Microsoft went head-to-head.

You may recall how IBM, with its acquisition of Lotus, attempted to dominate the enterprise portal space with a suite of solutions built around Lotus Domino, IBM Workplace, and later WebSphere Portal. A little later, IBM was also expanding into B2B integration and commerce with Sterling Commerce, yet another powerful but ultimately disconnected piece of its enterprise strategy. While Microsoft unified its stack, IBM’s fragmented approach left even its strongest assets struggling to find their place in a cohesive enterprise vision.¹.

Microsoft, on the other hand, pushed forward with its SharePoint and Windows Server-based solutions, leveraging its dominance in desktop computing and enterprise IT. SharePoint wasn’t necessarily superior. In fact, early implementations were notoriously unwieldy. Yet, despite its challenges, it won. Not because it was the best product, but because Microsoft controlled the broader enterprise stack including Windows, Office, and Exchange. And critically, you didn’t need to understand SharePoint to use SharePoint. If you already used Windows and Outlook, SharePoint was just there. It didn’t need to be perfect. It just needed to be everywhere.

Lotus Domino was, in many ways, ahead of its time. It introduced a development environment that enabled organisations to build applications without extensive coding, long before low-code/no-code became a trend. Its multi-tenancy capabilities allowed multiple applications to run seamlessly on a single server, making it efficient for businesses managing diverse workloads. And it integrated essential collaboration tools, combining email, workflow automation, and document management in a way that foreshadowed today’s digital workspaces.

However, one of the key reasons IBM lost the battle was that Lotus Domino was framed too narrowly, primarily within the groupware and collaboration space, rather than being positioned as a general-purpose cloud application platform. While it had many of the capabilities that would later define PaaS, it was never marketed or developed as such, limiting its broader enterprise adoption beyond its traditional collaboration use cases.

It also never seriously considered the prosumer user or the accessibility of low-code development. Domino was built for IT professionals, the yellow army, not for the growing wave of business users who wanted to build and automate their own solutions without deep technical expertise.

IBM’s last pivot with Lotus Connections, a platform that rivaled and in some ways surpassed Microsoft’s social collaboration efforts, came too late. Not least of all i think because the front door battle had been lost. That sold to HCL in 2017.

It was a telling battle to lose. The elephant had forgotten how to dance. Microsoft understood that controlling the entry point to enterprise IT was more important than having the best technology.

That same dynamic is playing out again today, and the fight for the modern portal layer will determine the next dominant enterprise platform.

The ServiceNow Parallel: Avoiding the ITSM Perception Trap

This challenge closely parallels and is directly related to ServiceNow’s potential risk if it continues to be perceived primarily as an IT Service Management (ITSM) or CRM vendor rather than a general-purpose enterprise platform.

A major factor in IBM’s struggle was the contrast between perception and reality. While Lotus Domino functioned similarly to an early PaaS, it was successfully pigeon-holed by the market, which constrained its broader adoption.

ServiceNow faces a similar challenge. Despite its powerful workflow automation and enterprise-wide capabilities, it is still widely perceived as just an IT service tool. This narrow but persistent perception, though a major misrepresentation, could limit its reach beyond IT, slowing its expansion into HR, finance, and other critical business functions. And just like IBM before it, this misperception could ultimately hinder its ability to compete with Microsoft and Salesforce for control of the enterprise portal layer.

IBM faced the same dilemma. Despite Lotus Domino’s groundbreaking capabilities, it remained locked in a niche. Lotus and Lotusphere were some of the most beautifully tribal technologies of their generation. They were beloved. They were infectious. But they were exclusive. And that exclusivity ultimately limited their reach, preventing IBM from redefining its position in the enterprise software landscape.

ServiceNow is keenly aware of this risk and is doing everything it can to avoid it.

It is aggressively expanding messaging beyond ITSM. It is making bold moves to capture CRM market share. It is embedding itself in CHRO and CXO suites. It is retraining its sales teams. And it is repositioning as an enterprise-wide workflow platform. Even its decision to bring on Idris Elba as a global brand ambassador signals an attempt to reshape its identity, making it more accessible, more mainstream, and more synonymous with business transformation, not just IT operations.

Will it be enough? Last time, Microsoft’s fragmented product portfolio beat IBM’s fragmented strategy. Can they now do it again?

Why This Time Is Different

While Microsoft emerged victorious in the last portal war, the dynamics of the next battle may not be as strongly in its favour. The fundamental shift toward Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) changes everything.

Unlike the past, when portals were largely self-hosted and required extensive customisation, today’s digital environments are being built on cloud-native PaaS platforms, eliminating the need for costly development cycles and accelerating implementation.

IBM’s Lotus Domino had many characteristics of a PaaS, but it lacked the cloud-based infrastructure and interoperability that define today’s leading solutions. The modern approach no longer requires complex, siloed deployments. Instead, organisations now have access to fully integrated ecosystems where portals operate as native services within broader enterprise clouds.

This seamless integration removes the need for standalone software installations and ensures interoperability across AI-driven automation, workflow management, and identity services. Unlike previous generations of portal technology, which often required extensive scripting and manual configuration, today’s PaaS portals are designed for more simplicity and efficiency. They still have to be architected, but the materials are all there.

The scalability of modern PaaS platforms is another game-changer. Deploying an enterprise or government portal no longer requires a multi-year IT project with massive upfront investment.

With cloud-native infrastructure, organisations can provision fully operational digital environments in days rather than months or years. This agility drastically reduces both costs and implementation risks, making large-scale digital transformation more feasible than ever before. Smaller skirmishes always suit the challenger, not the incumbent.

Start with an Onion

In the last portal war, a portal was just a portal. It was a UI layer, a way to organise access to applications. Useful? Yes. Transformational? Not really. It was about as exciting as an onion. An onion is just an onion. It doesn’t make the meal, and on its own, it isn’t particularly special.

But in my family, when you don’t know where to start, we have a saying: "Start with an onion."

My grandparents were third-generation cane farmers from North Queensland. At the end of each long day, my grandmother would take a rare moment for herself, escaping into the pages of a Mills & Boon novelette—until she heard my grandfather’s truck rumbling up the road. That was her signal. She’d put down the book, pull out a frying pan, melt some butter, and toss in an onion.

The smell of sautéing onions would drift through the house, sending a simple but unmistakable message: dinner was in motion. It didn’t matter what was coming next—whether it was stew, curry, or a roast. The foundation was being laid, and anything was possible.

This time, portals are more like my grandmother’s onion. The portal still hits the pan first. But now, it does more than just signal readiness—it shapes everything that follows.

Thanks to Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS), portals are no longer just passive entryways. They have become the orchestration layer—the control center of the modern enterprise. They integrate workflows, automation, and AI-driven processes to create systems that don’t just connect applications but actively shape how businesses operate.

The battle for the portal layer is the battle for the future of enterprise technology. And those who understand that shift will be the ones who define it.

Here is How

A fully integrated, low-code/no-code development platform does not stop at portals. It extends into the entire digital fabric of an organisation.

In the last portal war, an enterprise portal was just a way to navigate a collection of disconnected applications. Today, it’s the control layer and the starting point for everything.

It is the doorway to the system that seamlessly incorporates customer and employee portals, name and address registries, functional workspaces, service catalogues, knowledge bases, case management, process automation, asset management, forms development, portfolio management, workflow automation, integration tools, analytics, AI agents, dashboards, and a high-performance database.

And by providing this in a single PaaS, it removes nearly all traditional constraints in building enterprise solutions. This is the shift. It’s not about one tool or function. It is about who provides the foundation on which everything else is built. It is the door through which everyone walks.

With such a platform, organisations are no longer trapped by fragmented, department-specific tools. They are no longer constrained by legacy architectures that force them to stitch together disconnected solutions. Instead, they can rapidly design, deploy, and scale pretty much any kind of digital service or application. The enterprise is no longer bound by software limitations; only by imagination.

This is why the competition between ServiceNow, Salesforce, and Microsoft is not just another enterprise software fight. The vendor that wins the portal war will control the foundation of enterprise technology itself.

They will define how businesses and governments architect their digital ecosystems, automate processes, and integrate AI-driven intelligence. They will shape whether organisations remain stuck in outdated, rigid architectures or embrace a modular, scalable, and truly adaptive digital future.

The portal is no longer just an interface. It is the battlefield where the future of enterprise technology will be won.

The Three-Way Battle: Microsoft, Salesforce, Servicenow

This tectonic shift has set the stage for an enterprise showdown of grand proportions. The fight is no longer about individual applications. It’s not about CRM, ITSM, AI, or collaboration. The real battle is over who controls the front door through which employees, customers, and workflows connect across an organisation.

Right now, Microsoft and Salesforce have the upper hand, leveraging their ecosystems to dominate this space. But the game isn’t over. ServiceNow has a real opportunity. Perhaps the best. Certainly their best yet, to challenge that dominance.

If it can position itself as the enterprise’s primary gateway, it could reshape the competitive landscape. We saw Microsoft do it against IBM. But if it falters, Microsoft and Salesforce will only widen the gap.

The portal wars are back baby. And this time, the stakes are higher than ever.

1. I once spent 3-days in Fort Lauderdale at an IBM Sterling event waiting for Qantas to find my lost luggage. It arrived on the last day in time for me to check it back in for the long trip home.