BEA unveils portal product roadmap

By Jessica Twentyman

BEA Systems has outlined its plans to make the Plumtree portal, which it acquired in August 2005, the business ‘face’ of its service-oriented architecture (SOA) strategy.

SOA is a technology approach that organises the discrete functions contained in enterprise applications into interoperable, standards-based services. These can be combined and re-used quickly to meet changing business needs.

According to Peter Stanley, BEA’s senior vice president for Europe, the Middle East and Africa, between 10 per cent and 15 per cent of applications in large enterprises are now accessed using portals, “and that proportion will continue to grow,” he says.

In response, the company is positioning Plumtree (now re-badged as AquaLogic User Interaction) as the employee gateway to so-called ‘composite applications’, comprising functions held in disparate back-end systems.

At the same time, BEA plans to unify its two disparate portal technologies, the existing WebLogic Portal and the acquired AquaLogic User Interaction platform.

The first phase of that roadmap will see the introduction of interoperable portlets and page elements built on the JSR 168 (Java specification) and Web Services for Remote Portlets (WSRP) standards by mid-2006, according to Shane Pearson, BEA’s vice president of marketing. As a result, both WebLogic and AquaLogic Interaction portals will be able to consume the resulting WSRP-compliant portlets.

In the project’s second phase, due to be completed in the second half of 2006, capabilities including collaboration, search, distributed publishing and content usage analytics will be turned into common services. Many of these capabilities were already available in the former Plumtree product, but as services they will be consumable not only in both the WebLogic and AquaLogic Interaction portals, but in any Web-based application or environment.

These services could be used to support collaboration spaces, manage documents, index and search repositories or build composite applications and processes, with interfaces delivered in the context of the portal or other environments.

A third phase in 2007 will unify the back-end infrastructures of the WebLogic and AquaLogic Interaction portals to create a single, cross-platform environment supporting multiple application servers, including Microsoft .NET, IBM WebSphere and Tomcat as well as BEA’s own application server.

“BEA and Plumtree both had fine heritages as portal companies, but while BEA’s WebLogic Portal was aimed at developers, the Plumtree portal targeted business users and came with more business-focussed tools, such as content publishing. Combining the two approaches under the AquaLogic umbrella creates a strong proposition for the huge numbers of companies that are now pursuing an SOA strategy,” said Stanley.