Web portals usually fall into one or more portal categories (consumer, enterprise, commerce, and industry vertical) . The portals should support a wide, varying, and still rapidly evolving range of business models to generate a growing source of new revenue for businesses. Successful delivery of web portals is more constrained by business challenges than by technology. However, choosing the correct technology does need careful attention to detail.

A service oriented architecture based on composite applications and Web services will provide portals to existing and future devices. AMR Research analyst Jim Murphy says: "Portals let them show what Web services can do without a huge investment."

Companies can implement elements of a service-oriented architecture by building many software services that can be delivered via a shared Web portal. Such an approach won't solve all issues surrounding service-oriented architectures, but it's a way to get to a tactical, or quickly assembled, services-delivery mechanism, deferring some of the harder integration problems for later.