After watching from the sidelines as a slew of other companies adapted its popular My Yahoo! service to the enterprise market, Yahoo! has unveiled plans to launch a corporate information portal in conjunction with several big-name partners.
Citrix Systems, Critical Path, Hewlett-Packard, Inktomi and TIBCO Software are all involved in the new venture.
Corporate Yahoo! is a customised portal that will enable users to integrate content from their own intranets and other company sources with news and information from their My Yahoo! page. Separately today, Yahoo! and Google announced an agreement that makes Google the default search provider for Yahoo.com, the popular Web directory and navigational guide.
A collaborative effort Critical Path will provide the e-mail and calendar functions for the new service, while Inktomi, which is the current search platform for Yahoo!, will also fill that slot for Corporate Yahoo!. HP will act as the main reseller of the service, and Yahoo! will use Citrix's Nfuse technology to launch server-based applications through hyperlinks.
The My Yahoo! page lets users set preferences to track stock prices, sports scores, and news and information on a variety of pre-selected topics.
Corporate Yahoo! customers will now be able to display that content on the same page as their internal human resources information or other corporate data.
Yahoo! also announced it has signed up five customers to launch the service, including Inktomi, Alcatel Alsthom SA and the US State of North Carolina.
Companies such as Lotus Development and Microsoft have had corporate portal products on the market for months. But Yahoo!'s strong following among individual users may give it a foothold with corporate users looking for an interface similar to the simple My Yahoo! setup.
