Hi, I am Pankaj Kumar. I work in the enterprise software space as a Principal Technology Consultant at SAP America of Palo Alto, CA. I use this weblog to share my thoughts about my professional life as a SAP professional.Et Tu Plumtree and end of pure play portal vendors
In the rosy days of late nineties there were three pure portal play companies. Plumtree, Epicentric and Toptier. Then sometime in late 2000 SAP decided to complement there technology platform with a portal offering. They acquired Toptier for whopping $400 millions and married it with their existing portal product called workplace. This was a great buy for SAP as the acquired product has now morphed in the very mature people layer of SAP’s Netweaver platform.
Then somewhere in 2002 came Epicentric’s turn and it got acquired by Vignette for $32 millions. Vignette complemented their content development platform with the content delivery platform via Epicentric.
Today I read the news of Plumtree’s acquisition by BEA via Phil Wainewright’s excellent Loosely Coupled blog. It is sad in the sense that there is no major Pure Play Portal vendor left in the field 
But does that mean being pure portal vendor is not viable in today’s economic scenarios. You got to be an applications vendor and club portal as delivery platform. SAP has a whole slew of applications to be delivered via portal i.e. CRM, BW, HCM, SCM, and SRM etc. Vignette has while not a business application vendor has the content management system up its sleeve.
This gives rise to the question what application does BEA has? But again BEA has been a pure technology platform vendor. What perplexed me as rightly pointed by Phil in LCBlog was the decision to keep BEA’s existing portal separate from Plumtree stack.
“We now have leadership in both transactional and collaboration portals” Chuang said.
Both Chuang and Carges stressed that BEA will maintain separate portal offerings. “We will have two separate portal product lines for as long as we can see,” Carges said.
Keeping both the products separate would mean more pain for the customers in maintaining and operating two separate stacks. It would be interesting to see how long both of the stacks remain separate from each and how they evolve.
Last a disclaimer I have been a SAP Portals consultant for the last four years and naturally I have a strond bias towards SAP Portal which I consider the best positioned platform sitting at the top in SAP’s Netweaver Platform’s People layer. Also it would have been more interesting if Oracle had bought Plumtree 
Hi Pankaj:
I just wanted to introduce to you and other readers of yours – an online SAP blogging community called “The SAP Professionals Network” (www.SAPprofessionals.org). It is an open and interactive community where anyone can write SAP related blogs, articles, etc. In fact we are shortly introducing Moblogs also. You can check the announcement out at the top in the updates section.
Hope this will enrich the SAP world further!
Thanks,
Desh
It’s a little disappointing that with the purchase of Plumtree, people might mark it to be the end of pure play portal vendors. However, this really isn’t the case. If you look at the open source industry, there are still a myriad of pure portal vendors – not just including us, Liferay, but also others such as Exo. Open source portal companies that offer professional services have been around for years and most likely will be especially as the industry turns more towards the open souce trend.
A good article expressing a similar opinion:
http://www.it-analysis.com/content.php?articleid=12945
Kind regards,
Brian Kim
Chief Operating Officer
Liferay, LLC