With the acquisition of Plumtree (NASDAQ: PLUM) in a $200m cash deal, BEA Systems has plucked the last remaining pure-play vendor from the portal market. Plumtree's growth over the last four years has clearly stagnated with the company reporting a net loss of US$9.6 million at the end of 2004, and so it was only going to be a matter of time before it was snapped up.

Despite being the only pure-play portal vendor on the scene, Plumtree has struggled to build its business in the way it would have liked. In an attempt to broaden its appeal, Plumtree this year embarked upon a fresh course, with 'Composite Applications' and 'Integrated Activity Management' being the company's new watch-words.

In March this year, Plumtree announced its Analytics Server component. Designed to provide real-time reporting on activity and content usage within Plumtree's Corporate Portal, the tool provides corporate portal managers with important usage analysis and metrics. Also announced earlier this year was Plumtree's OEM partnership with Business Process Management (BPM) specialist Fuego - though one wonders now how this will fit with BEA's BPM strategy.

Had my colleague Mike Davis not been on holiday, then I'm sure he would have a word or two to say about the timing of this acquisition. Mike predicted the acquisition of Plumtree back in April 2003 (see Butler Group's Enterprise Portals, Technology Evaluation and Comparison Report) for sometime around now, and how right he was. Always ahead of the game, Mike also predicted that 2005 would be the year BEA joined Microsoft, IBM, and Oracle in the "outperform" category of the portal market; so my next question is: Who will Oracle acquire to stay in the race? With no pure-play portal vendors now left, Oracle may well decide to go after one of the Enterprise Content Management (ECM) vendors...so watch this space!

Richard Edwards.