At Last: WebSphere Portal Express From IBM

IBM

The company unveiled Thursday a version of WebSphere Portal Express and Portal Express Plus with additional collaboration capabilities due to ship at the end of the month. (See related story.)

The base product will let solution providers easily customize content and campaign management for customers and offers single sign on across applications, IBM said.

The Plus edition adds collaboration technologies from IBM's Lotus Software group. "[It offers online awareness, you can form team rooms, put documents in folders where they are full-text indexed, [there is group calendaring, task management and we include a document library for forms, documents, workflows, revision history," said Larry Bowden, vice president of portals at IBM.

Price for the base version is $77 per intranet user, with a limit of 2,000 users per server. For extranet use, the product costs $30,000 per CPU, supporting up to four CPUs. Once a customer passes the 2,000-user limit, IBM will recommend an enterprise version of the product.

WebSphere Portal Express Plus is $122 per intranet user, up to 2,000 portal users, and $47,820 per processor for extranet use also with the four-processor limit.

IBM executives said this pricing puts the offerings squarely into contention with Microsoft SharePoint Portal Server for companies with less than 2,000 users.

Big Blue maintains that entry-level SharePoint pricing for 25 users is $6,699, or $268 per user and only falls to the $77 per user level in volumes of 2000 or more. Microsoft discounted those claims. "They're citing one-off pricing. There are so many programs, Open, Select, Enterprise Agreements, that bring our pricing much lower," said Nancy McSharry Jensen, group product manager for SharePoint.

She maintained that, with Version 2 of SharePoint Portal Server, due next eyar, Microsoft will make deployment more flexible, making it easy for corporate, or top-down driven sites, and grass-roots-driven team sites, to be integrated.

IBM claims its software, packaged on four CDs, will install with five clicks. New users can be added in five clicks and 15 seconds, Bowden said.

SMB is clearly the technology hotspot right now. Research firm IDC has said 54 percent of technology spending next year will come from companies with less than 1,000 employees.

Bowden said IBM will focus predominantly on midsize businesses with head counts ranging from 100 to 1,000 employees.