Yahoo seeks to re-enter corporate arena

Yahoo has unveiled its latest attempt to enter the enterprise space with Corporate Yahoo, a so-called enterprise information portal.

End users can customise their Corporate Yahoo portals to include content from their intranets and other internal sources alongside news and information from their personal My Yahoo pages.

The move follows a similar announcement made a year ago with Hewlett Packard (HP) to develop Corporate My Yahoo, which combined company information with My Yahoo features such as email, instant messaging and address book.

The offering was expected to be launched to large companies in the fourth quarter of 1999, but has yet to appear on the market. Yahoo has declined to comment on the product, but an HP spokeswoman said both companies are "still working on it".

But Yahoo is late coming to a market that is already crowded with enterprise portals from Oracle, IBM, HP and Microsoft. Jawad Abbassi, analyst at the Yankee Group, said: "Whether Corporate Yahoo will be extremely successful or not remains to be seen."

Under the Corporate Yahoo banner, enterprises can connect company applications, such as Lotus Notes and enterprise resource planning packages, with Yahoo's web servers using a range of portal builder software developed in partnership with Tibco Software.

Yahoo has also unveiled support from a host of vendors. Inktomi will provide search and navigation technology, and WebEx will provide web conferencing and real-time meeting and video collaboration tools. Citrix Systems will enable companies to launch server information from standard web pages, while Netegrity's SiteMinder will provide single sign-on, authentication management services.

Other partners include Critical Path, which will provide messaging, personal information management and collaboration tools, and Network Appliance, which will offer storage facilities.