By RICHARD KARPINSKI

Awash in data from enterprise applications, in-house intranets, supplier extranets and the public Web, the average corporate decision-maker feels deluged rather than empowered.

The most useful nuggets remain tantalizingly out of reach as corporate information infrastructures lack the tools to calm the data tidal wave.

To the rescue comes a now-familiar construct, the Web portal, remade to suit the needs of corporate users. The concept of the enterprise portal, already gaining traction, will get a major boost in the coming weeks as a slew of vendors deliver some of the first portal-building tools for enterprise use.

"There's no question there's a demand. The genesis of the corporate portal movement is the runaway intranet, and the fact that most companies are looking for help in restoring some semblance of order to the unwieldy number of Web sites popping up across the organization," said Hadley Reynolds, director of research at the Delphi Group.

Companies are adopting the portal metaphor to solve an array of problems.

General Motors, for instance, is using DataChannel Inc.'s Rio server to "build a portal that will bridge Internet applications and legacy systems," said GM chief technology officer Dennis Walsh. The portal will first let GM car engineers check CAD/CAM drawings against parts and billing records. GM then plans to extend the hub to its manufacturing intranet, and even its public Web site.

Charles Schwab & Co. Inc. is using Viador Inc.'s new E-Portal Suite to deliver timely reports on mutual fund trading volumes to its supplier extranet, replacing mailed paper reports, according to Sid Bhatia, director of the financial firm's Mutual Fund Marketplace, a public Web site.

As demonstrated by the varied user implementations, enterprise portals mean different things to different people, and they can be applied to ease a wide range of problems. Long term, companies are likely to operate several niche portals, including employee, customer and supplier sites, all integrated in some way, experts said.

Perhaps the most ambitious take on portal tools comes from a trio of closely watched companies, Epicentric Inc., Netscape and Portera Inc. All three companies are slated for big coming-out product launches with a focus on the corporate portal as the seamless integration point for content, applications and e-commerce from within and outside the enterprise.

Netscape's Customized Netcenter is in beta now but is expected to launch formally in February, company officials said. High-profile beta customers including The Coca-Cola Co. and Mazda are using the Customized Netcenter development kit to build platforms that combine internal content and systems with content and applications from the public Netcenter portal site.

Portera will launch its first business portal, aimed at mobile professionals, early in February. Rather than organize internal resources, Portera plans to offer a series of portals combining managed content and applications, which corporations can subscribe to as a service and deliver to their end users, said Kevin McDonald, Portera's vice president of marketing.

Epicentric, meanwhile, is set to formally launch as a company in February, with products available in the spring. Epicentric offers both a server and hosted products in an open architecture, with hooks to internal reporting and document management tools, external content and even e-commerce offerings, said Oliver Muotro, Epicentric's vice president of marketing.

More traditional enterprise vendors are eyeing portals as well. Sun Microsystems is expected to flesh out its enterprise portal strategy in March, building on its NetDynamics acquisition and the recently unveiled Sun.Net enterprise applications.

Business intelligence (BI) vendors, meanwhile, view portals as a way to bring data warehouse and online analytical processing reporting applications down to line-of-business managers via a Web-based interface. Merrill Lynch & Co. Inc., in a report late last year, predicted that sales of enterprise portal products would top $14.8 billion by 2002 and eventually be as important as ERP applications. Sqribe Technologies Corp. and MicroStrategy Inc. are among the BI vendors with portal products.

Another vendor taking this approach is Viador, which this week changed its name from InfoSpace Inc. and launched E-Portal Suite, a platform of tools for enabling enterprise portals for data access and analysis.

Meanwhile, document management vendors see a major role for themselves in corporate portals, bringing a simplified Web front end and automated back-end management and indexing tools to help manage data flow.

Notable vendors in this area include Plumtree Software Inc., whose Plumtree Server 2.0 enables portal-like access to a wide array of corporate information sources; and Glyphica, whose PortalWare suite provides sophisticated document and knowledge management with a portal-like user interface.

A new entrant, Autonomy Inc., next week will introduce Portal-In-A-Box, an automatic indexing and publishing platform for creating corporate document management portals.