ISVs Put Portal Pieces In Place

Portals, which integrate data and applications "at the glass," in the words of IBM Software Senior Vice President Steve Mills, make more information readily available to business workers who can put it to use.

Darryl Gehly, vice president of business development at Watertown, Mass.-based solution provider Molecular, said the more functionality a vendor can add to a portal out of the box, the more flexibility it gives solution providers.

The selling point to customers is that a well-designed portal can reap additional rewards from money already spent on back-end databases and business applications ranging from ERP to supply chain management to CRM.

IBM recently added about 200 portlets to its WebSphere catalog, including its own Domino portlet as well as offerings from new ISVs. The catalog, viewable on IBM's Web site, will give solution providers access to technologies to help them tie back-end applications into corporate portals, IBM said.

IBM also has added 46 new partners to the catalog, bringing the total to 170, said Tim Thatcher, program director of marketing for IBM's portal products. "If someone needs a solution, they can search on the site and, if it's an IBM portlet, download it from there. For partner portlets, the user is linked to the partner site," he said.

Also newly available is IBM's Application Portlet Builder for Lotus Domino. That offering joins portlets for Siebel Systems, PeopleSoft and SAP as part of IBM's effort to tie all the key back-end environments into WebSphere portals, Thatcher said. Solution providers can use these portlets to customize applications for their clients. "[IBM] put more out-of-the box utility in so [solution providers] can build applications faster," he added.

"In a world where price pressures continue ... you have to be able to develop quickly and effectively yet still provide a custom solution," Molecular's Gehly said. "If you can pull together enough tools out of the toolbox that's already put together, be quicker to market and provide more value out of the box, then you win."

The portal space has been in flux over the past two years as pure-play vendors such as Epicentric,acquired by Vignette late last year,and Plumtree have ceded market share to larger software vendors like IBM, SAP and BEA Systems, which have portals linked to larger software suites.

A recent Gartner report gives IBM the lead in market share, with 13.5 percent of portal license revenue. SAP came in second with 9.7 percent and BEA third with 6.9 percent. Plumtree, the remaining pure-play portal vendor on Gartner's list, closely followed BEA with 6.6 percent market share.

IBM, as has been its practice for the past year or so, is highlighting third-party offerings to enhance its WebSphere Portal. Bowstreet unveiled Portlet Factory Express, a tool to help nonprofessional developers quickly create custom J2EE portlets, said Joe Lichtenberg, vice president of marketing at the Portsmouth, N.H.-based company. It costs $50 per user for intranet use and $10,000 for extranet use.

"You don't need a ton of programming expertise for this. It's a rapid application development tool," said Lichtenberg. "If you're a highly skilled J2EE developer, IBM has great tools in WebSphere Studio IDE. What we do is bring J2EE capabilities to corporate developers," Lichtenberg said.

The WebSphere brand covers application servers and portals and integrated development environments. IBM later this quarter plans to start beta-testing a version of its portal that will deliver server-based J2EE office productivity talents to users on demand. The new version is slated to ship in the third quarter.

While IBM does not publicly position this as an anti-Microsoft Office move, many close partners said the company will tell corporate customers that they can get the spreadsheet and word-processing capabilities of Office from this offering. At the very least, it could enable large enterprise accounts to negotiate better licensing terms with Microsoft, one large IBM integration partner said.

Integrators have said IBM has done a great job with the WebSphere brand, but under the covers, the lineup remains a lot of piece parts. "The complexity of WebSphere is the packaging of different products," said Richard Gornitsky, president of Livingston, N.J.-based solution provider Rigor Consultants. He said WebSphere "is more of a brand name" than an integrated product suite.

Neither WebSphere's success nor its flaws have gone unnoticed by Microsoft, which continues to ready its own e-business server suite, code-named Jupiter.

ELIZABETH MONTALBANO contributed to this story.