BEA Reports Momentum In Portal Market

BEA Systems

Pat O'Haren, senior director of product marketing at BEA, said deals with channel partners were responsible for about 20 percent of that growth over first-quarter license revenue.

BEA won 60 new portal customers in the second quarter, bringing its total to 650 for WebLogic Portal, introduced in June 2001 and shipped in October of that year, O'Haren said.

The product did especially well in the health-care, pharmaceutical, financial and telco vertical markets, he added.

O'Haren said BEA has partnered with systems integrators Deloitte Consulting, Accenture, Computer Sciences, Braun Consulting and Software Architects for significant portal deployments.

BEA also currently has portal projects in progress with some of those solution providers.

In addition to solution providers that are selling WebLogic Portal to customers or influencing customer portal decisions, O'Haren cited three other factors that have spurred growth in this area for BEA. Those factors are the release in June of WebLogic Portal 7.0, which facilitates easy portal deployment; companies consolidating existing portals on one middleware platform; and IT customers "seeing the value" in buying a complete suite of middleware products rather than simply a standalone portal, he said.

BEA was ranked 10th in license revenue growth in a recent report on portal leaders by IDC. A July report by the research firm named stand-alone portal vendor Plumtree as the market leader, followed by Computer Associates International, IBM, Epicentric, SAP, Oracle, PeopleSoft and TIBCO.

However, O'Haren said BEA's 50 percent growth surpasses the license-revenue growth Plumtree reported for its portal in the second quarter and should position BEA higher in the portal space this year.