Pure portal players wary, not worried

At Gartner's Symposium/ITxpo, Computer Associates CEO Sanjay Kumar hinted that the smaller portal vendors were in for rough waters as the big boys got into the business. Two of the "small" players, Epicentric and Plumtree, together control a majority of the portal market. David Berlind caught up with Epicentric Co-Founder and Chief Strategy Officer, Ed Anuff, and asked if the little guys are about to abandon ship.

ZDNet: According to Computer Associates CEO Sanjay Kumar, there are rough waters ahead for "little portal vendors." What's the water looking like to you?

Anuff: It often surprises people that the pure play vendors like Epicentric and Plumtree, two companies that were in this space from the very beginning, still command the largest market share. That's even after new entrants have come into the market like IBM, SAP, and so forth. If you look at Epicentric, we have more users worldwide on [our] portals than any other portal vendor. I think that it's easy to make those types of statements, and I'm not disputing the fact that CA will come in and capture share of the market for their customers that are primarily focused on CA applications. But, I would say that by no means are they going to be able to come in and displace all of the competitors. And I wouldn't discount the pure plays that have been battle tested over the last couple of years since the early days of this market.

ZDNet: When I think about the large vendors that could come in and take over the market as Kumar suggests, it seems to me that companies like Plumtree and Epicentric with 70 percent of the market would be ripe for an acquisition by a company that wants to get into the game quickly.

Anuff: We've seen that sort of consolidation and approach. If you look at the number three portal player, TopTier, SAP acquired them last year to fortify their entrance into the portal space. So, I can't specifically say what's going to happen with individual private vendors in this space. Clearly, that is the type of path that you could see occurring as the large vendors find that their efforts are not getting them into the game as quickly as they'd like.

ZDNet: Have you been approached by anybody?

Anuff: We've talked to a lot of companies from a partnership standpoint. The portal is the integration center for the enterprise so we work with a number of these companies on a regular basis to ensure that their applications integrate well with us. Even in the case where we may compete with a company's portal within their product line, we also work very closely with them in other areas. So, if you look at our relationships with BEA, IBM, and even vendors like SAP, we regularly work with [them] and collaborate to make sure that their point applications are accessible within our portal. It's not out of the question that at some point that would be something that would come up in discussions, but it's not something that I could talk about much beyond that.

ZDNet: So to the extent that you're familiar with a lot of these companies, and you know that portals are your core competency and not theirs, what do you have to say to a large vendor that says "we're coming into this space and look out?"

Anuff: I'm not as concerned with their issues of telling the little guys to look out. We've had to establish our value proposition for the CIOs and IT executives who are looking for a best of breed solution that can span across multiple back-end applications from multiple vendors. That's going to be our value proposition. My goal is not going to be to go and tell a customer that buys only CA applications that they should go with Epicentric's portal. I think there are advantages if they do. But that customer is likely to choose a single vendor infrastructure for their company.

Keep in mind that that type of vendor, what we call a stack vendor--the infrastructure vendors like an IBM and enterprise application vendors like an SAP and CA--will always have certain captive customers where they satisfy the majority of that customer's IT needs. But there are going to be a number of leading companies like Citibank, Chase, J.P. Morgan, Disney, and Bechtel that value having the ability to tie in the best component technologies from the best vendors, and those are the companies that have chosen Epicentric to power their portals. So, I don't think that those customers are going to switch anytime soon to a single vendor lock-in strategy like the one they might get from a company like CA or SAP.

ZDNet: You mentioned earlier that SAP acquired TopTier, and now SAP will ship that portal framework along with their products. When we spoke with Kumar, he stratified the portal market into three segments: portals that ship with other products like SAP, generic portal frameworks that everything snaps into, and, down the road, something more like a super user interface that crosses a lot of different entry points (wireless, networking appliances, desktop systems, etc.). Where does Epicentric fits into that?

Anuff: That's where we fit in today.

ZDNet: Which one?

Anuff: What Kumar has done is he's acknowledged the fact that there's a basic portal framework; what we sometimes disparagingly call "boxes on the screen." Something like the classic My Yahoo! interface. That's commoditized. You're going to get that from everything. You'll buy an app server and get a free mini-portal. You buy your app suite from SAP, and you'll get a portal. But the next layer above that requires the ability to manage multiple portal initiatives, to manage multiple access channels, and so forth, across a wide variety of vendor back-end technologies. That's where Epicentric's current offerings are at. I think that CA is trying to approach that. I don't know how much traction they'll get outside of their installed base with that. I think you have to have a compelling value proposition to the customer that you are truly unbiased in the applications that you integrate. So the question is will the customer think that CA is spending as much time in surfacing a PeopleSoft or SAP application in a CA portal as they will a CA application.

Then the question of where we're going is really that we're beginning see the emergence of the services-oriented architecture. Web services, EAI, various Java connection technologies are providing what's sometimes called a service fabric where all of the applications in your enterprise exist as pluggable components that get tied together dynamically by the user in a self-service fashion and then can be accessed via multiple delivery channels. The question is where are those channels going? Most of these efforts have been primarily browser based. We have been seeing wireless-based access. Even though it has been talked about for many years, we're now seeing some enterprise interest in [wireless]. E-mail-based deployments are on the horizon and then we're seeing a whole new generation of rich clients based on technologies like standard browsers, DHTML, JavaScript, and Flash as well as what Adobe and Corel are doing with SVG technologies. The portal is really the intersection point for that. That's really what the portal vendors--be they an Epicentric or a CA--are going to ultimately deliver if you consider what their products have to look like two to three years down the road.

ZDNet: Companies like Epicentric brought integration of heterogeneous systems and applications to the table. This integration was largely based on proprietary technologies. But today, there's a hard push towards standard protocols that help you manage that integration. Web services, as you know, is the collection of these protocols which, by the way, have yet to be officially set as standards by anybody. When those integration protocols like SOAP, WSDL, and UDDI reach a standard status--either de facto or sanctioned by a standards-setting body--won't that interfere with the unique selling proposition of a company like Epicentric that depends on a closed proprietary infrastructure?

Anuff: The smart vendors are the ones who not only planned for that, but ones that saw that as becoming inevitable. Within any enterprise technology, you start to see a commodification of the lower levels of the stack. Now, Epicentric and IBM last year partnered to create a standard initiative called WSRP--Web Services for Remote Portals. WSRP defined how applications plug into portals using Web services. This is an initiative that is underway at OASIS. It has the backing of all the major portal vendors at this point with the goal of delivering a set of specifications that are built on top of SOAP, WSDL, and UDDI and adding a user interface component to that so that. Ultimately, you'll have a whole catalog of these applications available via UDDI directories that any user can go into, look up an application, and place into their portal seamlessly. I think that it will be mid-year next year before you see that in any sort of widespread use. It is exciting because it opens up the range of applications that are available to a portal.

It's a lot like if you were to turn the clock back 12 or 15 years, and rather than Microsoft having come out with its proprietary Win32 API, it partnered with IBM, Symantec, Quarterdeck, and all those guys who were offering windowing environments to set a standard APIs for applications instead. So, what you've got here is this level playing field that means that any application vendor will be able to portal-enable their application to work with any portal vendor. I think that that's a better outcome than simply having implicit standardization happening like what happened with the desktop user interface.

ZDNet: Now that the world is moving towards portal standard-compliant back ends and front ends, doesn't that commoditize both sides of the equation in a way that presents significant risk to your company?

Anuff: No question about it. It provides a risk. But it also provides an opportunity. What we're seeing is that there are a lot areas where you can innovate on top of that. Epicentric's primary area of expertise has been in creating the management systems that allow large companies to manage their portal initiatives across multiple business units, inside and outside the firewall, and using a robust administration capability that allows you to authorize any person in your organization to control specific components, content, page layouts, navigational structures, etc. This is one area where we can raise the bar above generic portal implementations.

ZDNet: You mentioned partnering with IBM on the WSRP protocol. IBM is creating quite a track record for itself in terms of getting involved in the development of higher layer Web services protocols and maintaining the intellectual property rights to those protocols. What's the intellectual property situation with WSRP?

Anuff: WSRP is at the moment unencumbered by any specific patented technology. I believe that as part of the disclosures, people have identified any IP that they have; right now it will be implementable without concerns. But that's a land mine that is definitely affecting all of the different organizations. We're part of the World Wide Web consortium (W3C) and we see that perhaps with more of the horizontal specifications that has proven to be more troublesome for vendors that are trying to get their products out there. But this is something you're going to see everywhere. If you look at what our strategy is with respect to IP, Epicentric announced several of the first patents in the portal space. Our approach is to look at the high value areas to hang our hats on versus low-level protocols that everybody needs to build an ecosystem. I think that's the approach that everybody takes. IBM just tends to be more aggressive from the IP standpoint. I don't think their goal is to stymie the industry either.