Tarantella To Deliver Plumtree Integration Pack

Tarantella Plumtree Software

The Tarantella Integration Pack for the Plumtree Corporate Portal product line will enable solution providers to deliver access to Web-based and legacy applications through a single front-end Plumtree interface, said Guy Churchward, director of strategic alliances at Tarantella, based here.

Tarantella's Enterprise 3 platform offers Web-based access to mainframe, Windows, AS/400, Java, Linux and Unix applications without having to rewrite them for Web delivery, he said.

Plumtree was the leader in the $550.4 million enterprise information portal market in 2001 with a nearly 12 percent share, according to IDC. The research firm expects that market to reach $3.08 billion by 2006.

The deal marks the continuation of Tarantella's strategy to develop partnerships with leading portal vendors, Churchward said.

In April, Tarantella unveiled a joint marketing and development deal to integrate its Enterprise 3 platform with Sun Microsystems' iPlanet Portal server, now called the Sun One Portal Server.

The company also offers integration with Edge Technologies' enPortal, an offering focused on the government market, Churchward said.

"It's just a great step for them," said Doug Tjaden, president of Tridex Systems, a Tarantella solution provider partner in Englewood, Colo. "It's just a matter of the [portal market getting traction."

For Plumtree's channel partners, integration with Tarantella will broaden the types of applications with which portal customers can work, particularly for partners targeting vertical markets such as manufacturing, said Joe McVeigh, co-founder of Plumtree, San Francisco.

One of the most challenging aspects of portal deployment is the integration of legacy applications, said Robert Haddad, vice president of Project Performance. "The value of something like Tarantella is that you now have a framework that can do most of the heavy lifting to integrate with backend applications," he said.

The McLean, Va.-based Plumtree solution provider partner does not currently work with Tarantella but is now looking more closely at the technology because of its partnership with Plumtree, Haddad said.

Tarantella competes against Citrix Systems, Fort Lauderdale, Fla., which also has partnerships with several portal vendors, including Plumtree. Earlier this year, Citrix launched NFuse Elite, a portal server focused on the SMB market.