Since buying Plumtree, BEA has had two very separate portal products: its own WebLogic Portal product, and the acquired Plumtree portal which has since been renamed AquaLogic User Interaction and placed within the firm’s AquaLogic suite of service-oriented architecture applications.
Chuang told us that WebLogic Portal and AquaLogic User Interaction (Plumtree) have different uses. WebLogic Portal has been adopted by companies looking for highly scalable, transactional websites like BT.com, and Vodafone Live, he said. Plumtree has mostly been used as an internal corporate portal, he said
So are there any plans to integrate the two portal technologies? Chuang says not. We could integrate them but some companies are buying both, and nobody’s bitching. Yes, it would be much cleaner if we only had one product to support but at the moment I can sell some customers both – I’m trying to sell everyone who has one the other, and it’s going well.
Confirmation that there are no integration plans comes hot on the heels of news that Oracle is gearing up to become a two-portal shop like BEA. While Oracle already has a product called simply Oracle Portal, it is readying a new portal product, called Oracle Workplace Suite, for launch in the fourth quarter of this year.
David Keene, senior director of technology for Fusion Middleware in the UK told us that Oracle Workplace Suite will be different from its existing Oracle Portal. [Oracle Workplace Suite] will be more declarative thanks to its use of JavaServer Faces, Keene said. Thanks to JavaServer Faces we will be able to mix and match standard web pages, live data sources and so on for more complex portal development.
JavaServer Faces is the standard Java-based web application framework that simplifies the development of user interfaces for Java 2 Enterprise Edition, J2EE, applications.
From what is known about the forthcoming Oracle Workplace Suite, it appears that it will compete most closely with BEA’s WebLogic Portal, while the existing Oracle Portal competes with BEA’s acquired Plumtree portal technology.
Today though it is BEA that has the bragging rights in the portal market, as Chuang noted: I always thought the portal acts as an integration hub for users, and thanks to the Plumtree acquisition I now have the biggest share in the corporate portal market.
BEA also claims that the acquired Plumtree portal technology is the only portal on the market that runs on both Java and Microsoft .NET.
