BEA 'Rationalizes' New Portal Strategy

BEA's Enterprise Portal Rationalization strategy consists of best practices, strategic partnerships and a new assessment service through BEA's professional services arm, said Nils Gilman, senior director of product marketing for San Jose, Calif.-based BEA.

Enterprise Portal Rationalization is aimed at solving the problem BEA customers have identified as "Web sprawl," or a mass of Web-based portal applications running in different places throughout the enterprise, he said.

"People have been deploying departmental portals, portal front ends, traditional enterprise apps, simple static HTML sites, point-to-point connectors between these things," Gilman said. "The strategy we're putting together [is aimed at] how to confront Web sprawl and how to reduce the chaos that large and medium-size enterprises are dealing with today."

Key partners that will be deploying services around the strategy are HP Services, Accenture and Enterpulse, Gilman said.

BEA's own professional services arm also is offering a business value assessment service that will investigate a customer's multiportal infrastructure and propose an architecture for how to deal with the problem using WebLogic Portal alone or in addition to other WebLogic software. However, the service is designed to be a preliminary step and BEA likely will use partners to deliver the actual solution, Gilman said.

"This service is very straightforward and meant to be the first step in the process," Gilman said. "It's not meant to make a big profit for BEA."

While IBM and Oracle do not have strategic initiatives around portal consolidation, spokespeople from both companies said their products have the capabilities to provide software and services for such a solution.

The IBM spokesperson went a step further and said consolidating multiple instances of portals on one standard software deployment is "pretty much inherent in everything we do," so the company does not have a separate strategy to articulate it.