This came up in a discussion between Scott and I today and I realized that it would be good to provide the context in which the statement was uttered.
When that sentence first spewed forth from my frontal lobe, I was attempting to convey the advantages (at least in our heterogeneous university IT environment; unknown for others) to bottlenecking users through a single point for access to enterprise-wide applications. By looking at what might be referred to as a single point of failure instead as a single point of communication, the notion of having a single container in which to place context-specific messages about these enterprise apps is made visible.
Really, this is just a re-wording of the fundamental purpose of a campus web portal, but after our horrific experience with Campus Pipeline, significant resistance had arisen to the single gateway concept. (Some out-of-context legacy IT mumbo-jumbo about avoiding SPOFs that might have been true in the 90s fed this resistance as well.) People responsible for these other enterprise apps wanted to make sure that the non-portal avenues to their apps were widely publicized. They were questioning the reliability of the new Portal. Fortunately, with a mixture of CAS, some load-balancing content switches, and (most importantly) top-end admin/developer and network talent, those dragons were slain.