WebSphere Lowers The Bar With Portal-Express

IBM’s WebSphere brand has become a very popular product in the application server market, as well as in its newer role in the Portal space, but these robust, feature-rich products have been priced and focused on the big company buyer.

It’s not that IBM wants to neglect the SMB market – in fact, it would like to be an important infrastructure software supplier to SMB’s – but rather that taking all that function and robustness and scaling it down isn’t trivial.

Smaller companies want products that are much easier to use and that are priced to their smaller needs and budgets.

WebSphere Portal-Express, the first of several IBM offerings headed for the SMB market, does just that.  The product is designed to be easy to install, customize, maintain, and use, for both IBM business partners and IBM SMB customers, allowing them to customize a page layout, add a new portlet, add a new user, or completely change the portal's interface.

WebSphere Portal-Express is priced at $77 per Intranet user (up to 2,000 users per Portal Server), and offers full support for portal personalization, campaign management, single sign-on across applications, authentication, authorization, and communication between portlets. An Extranet license is $30,000 per processor (with no user licenses). 

The portal can run on a single server and while it includes its own LDAP directory, users may choose to substitute other directories such as Microsoft Active Directory or Lotus Domino Directory.  A selection of popular databases is also supported.

Portlets – connectors to applications and information built for WebSphere Portal-Express -- may be used across the entire WebSphere portal family and a Portal-Express Plus product offers additional features including instant messaging, chat, virtual team rooms, group calendaring, task management, document libraries, and document sharing and revision capabilities.  Portal Express Plus is $122 per Intranet user (up to 2,000 users per Portal Server), and $47,820 per processor for Extranet use.

In addition to extensive programs to certify and support business partners in the SMB market for WebSphere Portal-Express, IBM will also be offering the product through a partnership with J.D. Edwards, who will be integrating it with their own software offerings to the mid-market in areas such as supply chain management and customer relations management.

The product is likely to also find a home in the departments and remote locations of larger organizations, where local IT skills are not available.

Of course, other players are interested in the “quick and easy” part of the portal market.  Next week we’ll look at Citrix’s offering, nFuse Elite, access portal server. 

 

(back to top)  

Comments or Questions: Send Email to opinions@wohl.com

Home/ Search / 2005 Articles / Issue Archive / Free Newsletter

Entire contents © 2001  by Amy D. Wohl. All rights reserved. Reproduction of this publication in any form without prior written permission is forbidden.