Epicentric takes portals to the next level

EPICENTRIC IS A leading provider of corporate portals and one of the first companies to advocate the adoption of Web services. Today, corporate portals are evolving into platforms for a wide range of collaborative enterprise applications. In an interview with InfoWorld Editor in Chief Michael Vizard, Epicentric’s co-founders Ed Anuff, executive vice president and chief strategy officer, and Oliver Muoto, vice president of market development, talk about the forces shaping the next generation of corporate portals.

InfoWorld: How has this market changed over the years?

Anuff: The portal space has grown up. It’s had a number of large entrants into it by way of product line extension from [companies] like IBM, BEA, SAP, and CA. Meanwhile, the pure-player, independent portal space [has] really consolidated down to two major players, those being Plumtree and Epicentric. I would say that we now have to work a lot harder for our money, but I would say in terms of market share and in terms of new customer acquisition that we’re doing very well. We’re quite pleased with the way things are going for the company.

InfoWorld: How do you fend off those sizable competitors?

InfoWorld: What kind of competitive threat does Microsoft pose in this space?

Anuff: We still see that within most of the large customers they’re working on a Unix infrastructure and portals are viewed as part of an enterprise infrastructure. Thus far, we haven’t seen [Microsoft] as being a major threat to what we’re doing. I think that in the future we will see them as a more serious player in the small/midsize enterprise space, and certainly they will continue to play strongly in the departmental level. I think that their plans to get more serious about the portal space will have more impact on the Windows-only vendors like Plumtree.

InfoWorld: How has the downturn in the economy affected the corporate portal market?

Anuff: The overall slowdown in IT spending has certainly affected us, like it’s affected everyone in this industry. But luckily, portals are one of the key areas where people are continuing to spend money in software and infrastructure.

InfoWorld: Why is that?

Anuff: If you look at why portals are taking off, it is because the growth of Web application development in the enterprise is required for there to be an integrated deployment environment for applications. The cost of managing desktops has gone through the roof, and that’s the reason why we’ve moved to Web-based applications. Once you do that, though, it’s been found that in order for those applications to be productive, you need to access them in a highly integrated environment that ties together data and functionality across those applications in a common environment that is highly tied to a user identity and [that] uses permissions and entitlements in a very deep way to control what you can see and what you can change. Epicentric’s basic key value proposition is that we believe you have to provide a management environment around the user interaction environment.

InfoWorld: Given all the competitive products, will you tie your portal into other portals as the market matures?

Anuff: We clearly see that part of the mandate of an independent portal vendor is to somehow be able to provide a way to tie in these different portal solutions. One of the good things is that a lot of these activities [have] standardization for the APIs and the integration mechanisms, so it definitely becomes feasible to do that.

InfoWorld: What impact are standards having in this space?

Anuff: We see standards as one of the big drivers this time around. CIOs have seen what happens when they get vendor lock-in, and they don’t want to create a new Microsoft for the enterprise application desktop. So as a consequence, you’re seeing things like the JSR-168 initiative that’s standardizing the way that applications plug into portals. In the Web services space, Web Services for Remote Portals and Portlets is about defining how Web services are used to surface applications within portals.

InfoWorld: How will that change the nature of the competition in this market?

Anuff: If you look at how vendors are going to differentiate themselves in this space, they’re going to do it in a couple of different ways. We think that you’re going to see the emergence of a lot of give-away portals that are thrown in with your application server or your other enterprise applications. We think that ultimately that’s what the portals from an IBM or a BEA are going to be about. They’re going to compete on price and giving away a bundled portal.

Now if you’re giving something away, you don’t invest a lot in making it the best of breed. So we think that the flipside opportunity will be for vendors like Epicentric that create a best-of-breed product that has enterprise quality manageability. Clearly we’re not going to give it away, but we are going to go and allow you to run a lot of the same applications because of standards adherence. We think that is going to be an important alternative for the CIOs that are taking that general contractor approach of taking the best-of-breed approach of having the best application server, the best portal server, the best database server, and so forth. The challenge for us is to focus on the elements that aren’t going to be commoditized into the core infrastructure. We’re not going to focus on innovating on the same things that are going to be given away by BEA and IBM.

InfoWorld: Given the sensitivities around IT costs these days, how service-intensive is the corporate portal space?

Anuff: What’s happened is that we have seen [companies] like IBM enter the market, and clearly their business model is very much about a service-centric sale. There’s nothing wrong with that, because what happens is as you start to deal with these larger deployments, there are going to be issues that have to be addressed that are going to require some level of service. But Epicentric’s business model is not a service-centric business model. We do work with Accenture, and EDS is one of our largest global service partners, but I would say that there’s a difference between serviceware, which you see from the companies that have large service arms to their organization, and what you would see from the standpoint of it being a responsible recommendation that a company that’s trying to deal with either large-scale deployments, from either a scalability purpose or simply helping design enterprise deployment methodologies for how to bring your users online and to teach them best practices. Services is a double-edged sword. Some companies are going to try to bring in a huge service engagement when all you wanted to do was bring your department or business unit online with a portal. In other cases, we’re just talking about literally hundreds of thousands of users [who] are going to be accessing this system, and nobody can make a claim that you’re going to be able to do that in a simple push-button install.

InfoWorld: One of the places that costs tend to get out of control around a portal project is in the area of integration, and pre-defined portal connectors were viewed as being too lightweight to do anything meaningful. How do Web services change the nature of integration?

Anuff: First of all, portal connectors were a double-edged sword. They were very important at the departmental level, where people needed to deploy their system quickly and they didn’t have a lot of resources to do it. The portal connectors solved that problem by giving you a nice out-of-box integration. At the enterprise level, two things come into the picture: EAI middleware and Web services. Right now within the industry there [are] a lot of questions being asked, [such as] When do you use middleware? When do you use Web services? The answer is, It’s not really an either/or [situation]. Web services are an open calling mechanism. The emergence of SOAP-based or Web services-based connectors is a good thing because it will allow these applications to be surfaced more readily. Web services are shining a light on the interoperability problem. They don’t necessarily change the picture in a major way, but because Web services have so much momentum, most enterprise vendors are being called upon to open up their APIs via Web services.

I think a more important question will be, To what extent does some level of business process orchestration on top of Web services-exposed APIs become a necessary capability in between the enterprise application and the portal in order to create more meaningful application access within the portal? That isn’t something that the portal vendors alone will solve; it’s something that the portal vendors and/or the current generation of EAI vendors will solve. That will happen by either the portal vendors becoming more business-process focused or will occur through initiatives like WSRP [Web Services for Remote Portals] and WSIA [Web services for Interactive Applications] so you [can] package up your business processes in the form of interactive, embeddable applications that can be embedded in the portal. The flipside is that things like BPML [Business

Process Modeling Language] or WSFL [Web Services Flow Language] could allow you to surface business processes in a way that a portal can consume more readily.

InfoWorld: As a provider of a Java application, what’s your take on Microsoft .Net?

Anuff: We find that .Net is a very good way of having a Java-based infrastructure or Java-based application communicating with Microsoft-based technologies. Earlier this year we released a .Net integration kit that allowed you to use Visual Studio .Net to build Web forms for a type of Microsoft Web application technology and to basically surface them within the Epicentric portal. We will also be able to invoke Web services built with Visual Studio .Net from within both the Epicentric portal as well as Java applications that are running within the Epicentric portal. So we see it as a strong interoperability tool.

InfoWorld: What are your customers saying about Microsoft.Net?

Anuff: Our customers tend to have that same perspective. One of the things that we’ve seen has been that people like technologies [such as] Visual Basic for rapidly building sort of small, throw-away applications. With .Net, they want to be able to rapidly build Web applications. They’ve got a certain segment of their development population that they want to be able to leverage to build those apps. And yet they want to leverage it within an enterprise-wide Java infrastructure. If you pull open any newspaper, you’ll see in the classified ads a Visual Basic programmer [costs] about $25 an hour and a Java programmer is like $150 an hour. Obviously, that’s reflected in terms of full-time employees and so on in terms of the cost savings. The CIOs that I talk to really view it as a cost management approach. If an application that they’re building needs to be rapidly built and is really targeted at a business user, they tend to throw business analysts at it who know Visual Basic and leverage it within Epicentric. In the past, that sort of integration was really difficult before .Net and Web services. It used to be a royal pain to call Java from the Microsoft technologies and visa versa. One of the practical, killer apps of .Net that tends to get lost because neither Sun nor Microsoft want to point it out, is that it’s just a great way of calling, for example, Visual Basic from Java and visa versa.

InfoWorld: How do we drive Web services out to the business analyst community?

Muoto: One of the things we do well is our Enterprise Foundation Builder [EFB]. It empowers business users to make use of Web services. I think there’s a lot of interest around Web services, but until now it’s been fairly developer-centric. It’s been hard for business users to get really excited about making SOAP calls into an application. What EFB does is [it] allows the business users to go out there, identify Web services, and meaningfully bring them together to create a simple application. I think we’re going to see some of those trends in the area of Web services and we are doing all that we can to be ahead of that curve and really understand what people are going to be doing there.

InfoWorld: So what are they doing?

Muoto: People want to essentially do just-in-time portal provisioning. One thing that you can do in an Epicentric portal foundation server is you can run hundreds of individual portal sites that are interconnected to create portal networks. People are really buying into this whole idea, using things like delegated administration, to give people the ability in a secured environment to essentially provision a portal in a just-in-time manner for the duration of a week for the purpose of collaborating on a project, and then have that portal go away but reuse the components elsewhere. There’s a lot of this self-service provisioning that’s going on that’s interesting to these enterprise environments. The notion of dynamic groups actually goes in hand with just-in-time portal provisioning. There are organizations [within which] roles and responsibilities change on a weekly or even a daily basis. We have accommodations for [those] situations where, for example, you want to be in multiple groups or your group changes dynamically through a workflow process.

InfoWorld: What impact will wireless users have on portal applications?

Anuff: We ultimately believe that the portal needs to be able to support multiple channels of access. In the future, you’ll see multiple access channels supported by portal vendors. If you look at Epicentric’s activities in wireless, our approach has been to try to build an XML integration layer in the way that we compose our presentation layer that makes it possible to go to wireless. But corporate wireless access has not yet taken off like people expected it to.

InfoWorld: So at the end of the day, what takes corporate portals to the next level?

Anuff: The enterprise portal management concept is a key differentiator between what we do and what the other vendors are doing. We feel that all the issues of allowing you to manage multiple Web initiatives, to be able to have self-service administration, content creation, service provisioning, and so forth, is key. We essentially provide a platform that allows you to have a high degree of component reuse. Portals really come out of the fact that the old models of Web development have become too costly. Building a Web site with a Vignette or even a BEA is like painting a 747 with a Q-tip. In the enterprise space, there is a call for change in the way that content management and content creation happen within the portal, and it’s really this whole self-service context. People want to be able to create a page or modify a page and so on themselves. A lot of what we do is about enabling that sort of flexibility. The capability of basically being able to rapidly assemble multiple sites in a componentized environment is essential. As it becomes possible for us to manage any portal or Web application, it is really going to change the picture of where Epicentric fits in the value chain of IT infrastructure.

Source: www.infoworld.com