Portals 2008
Enterprise Portal Marketplace: 2008 Vendor Risk Profile
by Janus Boye
17-Jan-2008
It is all too easy to identify vendors for your shortlist based on their supposed "leadership" status in the market -- status conveyed either by analyst firms or by the vendors themselves. However, research for our Enterprise Portals Report 2008 shows enterprise portal suppliers employing a very diverse range of technologies to solve an equally wide range of business problems.
Major enterprise portals vendors will gladly dazzle, wine, and dine your team. In many cases they will pitch you on the strength of their underlying application server, which you may already license. Although they may appear to be a safe and conservative choice, in fact today many of the larger vendors are ironically higher-risk partners for your portal initiatives. Witness yesterday's Oracle acquisition of BEA, which will leave the former supporting no less than four separate enterprise portal products.
Finding the Right Fit
Our goal is to provide you with current information to make the right "fit" choice for your specific needs. Once you have identified set of enterprise portals that could potentially meet your requirements, you also need to consider the status of the vendors. Note that "leadership" status on an analyst chart does little more than tell you which vendors have the biggest revenues in the sector, along with the widest array of technology to offer. It does not tell you whether the vendor's corporate status is in state of flux, or whether the product set is currently undergoing an overhaul, or whether both are in the process of becoming somewhat irrelevant in the marketplace due to a lack of innovation and investment.
All of these factors involve risk to you, the buyer. So the purpose of our analysis (and the chart below) is to provide you with some key indicators to recognize and weigh those risks. It makes for very useful reading, we believe, since you will see that, in some circumstances, major brands may actually represent an unacceptable near-term risk profile.
All the same, to gain maximum value from this chart you need to consider two key factors: Your own enterprise and the portal marketplace. Each organization is different. What represents a high risk to one may represent a chance for innovation and a competitive advantage to another. What represents a staid, uninspiring, and somewhat slow-moving product set to one customer may represent a solid area of comfort and low risk to another. Matching your appetite for change and risk against the vendors becomes an essential step in your selection process.
Equally important is the knowledge that this chart is in constant flux. Each edition looks different as new products and initiatives are launched and others mature. As many portal projects stretch over many months (in some cases years), monitoring this vendor movement is an important part of the project process.
Making Sense of the Chart
The chart below represents four key dimensions that we believe should supplement a functional, and cost/value analyses in any major procurement decision. Use this tool in addition to the specific vendor chapters that look in more detail at the specific functional and technical capabilities of the product sets.
Enterprise portals systems will become integral to your business, and in committing to a purchase you are also by default committing to a long-term relationship with the vendor.
Let us be clear – there is no "right" or "magic" or "leader" location this chart. Buyers with strong internal IT processes and a tolerance for "early adoption" may favor a vendor undertaking fundamental change, on the grounds that they can influence roadmaps and new technology and “leapfrog” competitors stuck with older tools and approaches. Other customers will prefer an enterprise portal supplier evolving at a more moderate pace; while still other buyers will prefer a more conservative approach. It is for you to decide where your preferences lie.
The four dimensions we plot are:
- Size -- Denotes the relative size and importance of the vendor in the broader technology marketplace.
- Focus on Portals -- Indicates how much of the supplier’s efforts are focused on enterprise portals. For some it is a side activity, for others it is the sole focus.
- Vendor Evolution -- Weighs the current pace of change at the vendor itself: Is it evolving as the marketplace changes? Has it just been acquired, or acquired another product? For open source packages, think “Community” instead of vendor.
- Product Development -- Weighs the current pace of change for the enterprise portal. Is the product line about to undergo a major revision? Is the supplier in the midst of trying to piece together many disparate modules? Or is little happening, with a mature product undergoing minimal change?
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Each buyer will rate the importance of these dimensions differently and we encourage you to make use of this tool as a point of discussion with your peers. Our placement of the vendors denotes our assessments as of early 2008; we will update it at each revision of our research. The vendors are in motion but here is our quick snapshot.
The Vendors
Apache
As the portal project from Apache you might expect the same level of quality
and popularity as the Apache webserver or its worthy search engine, Lucene.
Unfortunately this is not the case, but Jetspeed does seem to be stirring after
a long period of inactivity. The Jetspeed project is progressing with its new
release and has seen some growth in its developer community. Hence our placement
of Apache in the Maintenance sector of the chart.
BroadVision
BroadVision flew high during the dot-com days with its focus
on one-to-one (1:1) marketing. It also fell hard in the years afterwards,
but now with almost 2 profitable years behind it, the company seems to have
stabilized, albeit at a fraction of its former size. BroadVision Portal as
a product has been steadily improved over the years and hence we place BroadVision
in the Continuity sector of the chart.
eXo
eXo Portal has established itself as a solid open source
portal offering with a reasonably strong community, especially in Europe.
After a comparatively slow start, eXo picked up the pace in 2007 concluded
by a delayed major new release that just made it out in December 2007. Hence
our placement of eXo in the Shifting sector of the chart.
IBM
After a slow start to the enterprise portals market, IBM has picked things
up, in particular during a busy 2007. While the company does much than enterprise
portals, it has taken steps to fight off the competition and innovate with
IBM WebSphere Portal. New "accelerators" for dashboards, collaboration,
and specific industry solutions help drive down the traditional lengthy IBM
projects, while IBM since September 2007 has a public beta of Version 6.1
that is not due out for general availability until Q2, 2008. Hence our placement
of IBM in the intersection of Balance, Refresh, Shifting and Turbulence sectors
of the chart.
Liferay
Liferay is a quite popular open source portal system. Liferay
has been moving fast in 2006 and 2007, e.g., with a major user interface refresh
in June 2007, but now seems to have slowed product development a bit to focus
mainly on stabilizing the platform and get the community up to speed. A major
new release is due out in 2008, but according to Liferay this will mainly
focus on developers. Hence our placement of Liferay in the Shifting sector
of the chart.
Microsoft
Despite all the hype around SharePoint, enterprise portals
is not a major area of focus for Microsoft as a whole, even if it is getting
more attention now than in the past. But the deeper story here is that SharePoint
remains nowhere near complete or mature, even if it is progressing. While
MOSS 2007 came out in late 2006, the rate of product development has now slowed
down significantly and all the market has heard from Microsoft is a single
service pack primarily with bug fixes. We don’t expect much more from Microsoft
in 2008. Hence our placement of Microsoft in the Maintenance sector of the
chart.
Oracle / BEA
This is clearly a period of change for Oracle. Throughout 2007, they continued
their parallel engineering efforts with their two portal products: the more
mature Oracle Portal and quite young Oracle WebCenter. Oracle insists that both
products have a future, but the company doesn't seem to walk the talk, as WebCenter
gets most of the attention, even though today only about 5 initial customers
have gone live with WebCenter. To complicate matters, newly-acquired BEA --
similar to Oracle -- sells two significantly overlapping enterprise portals:
BEA WebLogic Portal and BEA AquaLogic User Interaction. To be fair, they do
address different functional use cases, and BEA has been busy innovating on
both fronts, even so, the future of the company remains a bit unclear. Hence
our placement of Oracle in the Turbulence sector of the chart.
Plone
Plone has a track record of predictable roadmaps and in
general it is a comparatively well managed, community-driven project. The
next major release of Plone, Version 4.0, is expected sometime during 2008.
As of writing (December 2007) few details were out on what will be included
in the new release other than making the Zope/Python-based package more approachable
by lowering the learning curve. Hence our placement of Plone in the Balance
sector of the chart.
Red Hat (JBoss)
After smaller JBoss was swallowed by Red Hat in 2006, the
product has now been fully integrated into the larger Red Hat organization.
In our view product evolution has slowed down, while Red Hat still is evolving
as a vendor, in particular with their business model, although they remain
less partner-friendly than JBoss was in the past. Interestingly adoption of
the product does not seem to have picked up since the acquisition. Hence our
placement of Red Hat/JBoss in the Continuity sector of the chart.
SAP
SAP is indeed a large vendor, but unlike the other large
infrastructure vendors in this report, SAP seems the least interested in enterprise
portals. NetWeaver is dragging behind the competition with an incredibly steep
learning curve and a lack of common functionality found in almost all other
portal products. To be fair, SAP has released additional roadmap information,
including plans for a new user interface, but these plans have been lying
on the drawing board for quite a while. Hence our placement of SAP in the
Stasis sector of the chart.
Sun
Sun went through much turbulence in 2007, but product development for the Portal
Server now seems to have slowed a bit. Among the key developments in 2007 was
an open source push, alongside an increased focus on e-government. Sun as a
vendor also seem to have been finally turned around after some tough years.
Hence we've placed Sun in the Shifting sector of the chart.
uPortal
uPortal is focused on the requirements of higher education,
but seems to have slowed down a bit developmentally in recent years. The last
major release dates back to 2002, when Version 2.0 was released. Now 5 years
later in Version 2.6.1, a fair bit has happened to the product, but the market
has also come a very long way. To be fair a Version 3.0 is expected in Q2
2008, but mainly with a technical focus. Hence our placement of uPortal across
the Maintenance bordering Balance sectors.
Vignette
Vignette undertook a major new portal release in 2007 and also evolved quite
a bit as a vendor. Although not entirely focused on enterprise portals, Vignette
Portal seem to be getting increased attention among the dozen products sold
by the ECM vendor. The company is persistently rumored as a take-over target,
hence we've placed Vignette in the bottom of the Shifting sector of the chart
[Editors note: this article was excerpted from the recently updated Enterprise Portals Report 2008, which contains detailed evaluations of each of these vendors.]