So the last of the pure-play enterprise portal vendors, Plumtree, has been acquired, and unlike its two former rivals, Epicentric and Corechange, it was not taken by an Enterprise Content Management vendor (Vignette and Open Text in the case of the others), rather it has been snapped up by BEA Systems, Inc. In my opinion, this is the best fit of the lot.

BEA is an application infrastructure software company, and that, as IBM realised when it put its portal under the WebSphere brand, is exactly what an enterprise portal is. It is a framework for accessing information and services. It is the top layer of a Web services and Service Oriented Architecture, not an application in itself. Plumtree recognised this when it first created a wide range of ‘out-of-the box’ gadgets (portlets) to connect with popular enterprise applications, and later ran the ‘no more empty portals’ campaign, highlighting the need for content management technologies to deliver information of value into the framework. Since then Plumtree has enhanced the collaborative tools within what it now calls the ‘Enterprise Web Suite’.

BEA already has a really good, although not as mature, enterprise portal product, but, more importantly, it has probably some of the best development tools for application development of software infrastructure, and its infrastructure is focussed around transactions.

Originally Plumtree Corporate Portal was released in a wholly Microsoft environment, but the (potentially defensive against acquisition by Redmond) decision to offer Corporate Portal as a Java application (sensibly with an identical code base) has made it attractive to those vendors who are agnostic of the .NET framework and roadmap.

If the deal is agreed by the Plumtree shareholders, then the fun will really begin. What BEA is buying is in excess of 700 customers, many of whom are definitely ‘blue chip’ – Airbus, Ford, the US Army, and British Land. Of course what BEA is also acquiring is Plumtree’s always-eager development team, who live for ‘raising the bar’, and beating the likes of IBM and SAP on their ‘home’ territory. The real challenge in the acquisition will be to secure and encapsulate both the spirit and the people, in order to maintain the thought leadership that Plumtree undoubtedly has always had.

This acquisition is not just an opportunity to buy market share, as BEA has itself also recently been seen as an acquisition target, with questions about its branding and direction being raised by financial, as well as IT analysts. The running of Plumtree’s operation as a business unit, and the exploitation of its Intellectual Property to add value to other BEA deployments will demonstrate whether BEA has the strength, and the ‘nous’ (just like Plumtree to this point), to go it alone, and remain independent.

At US$200 million, with Plumtree’s customer base, and its staff and IP, BEA has got itself a bargain; the challenge now is not to waste the fruits of the tree.

Mike Davis