Navantis Solution Stirs Up Portal Market

Navantis said its fixed-price/fixed-time solution,which does not include the cost of the SharePoint licenses,undercuts by hundreds of thousands of dollars knowledge management solutions from vendors such as Plumtree, IBM and BEA Systems.

"No one will be able to match this price/performance," said Andrew Nichols, head of the knowledge management business at Navantis. "This is a price/performance leader."

The Navantis solution, which comes with business consulting, architecture consulting and network integration and implementation, provides realtime access to data throughout an enterprise from multiple devices including wireless devices and phones. Navantis plans to unveil the Enterprise Knowledge Portal offering this week.

Navantis is aiming to deliver maximum return on investment (ROI) for the lowest possible up-front cost, Nichols said.

"There is a lot of skepticism about the return on investment on these $1 million to $2 million knowledge management portals," Nichols said. "CIOs can swallow a $100,000 to $200,000 return on investment story better than they can a $5 million ROI story. We're coming in and providing enterprise-level quality at a much lower cost."

Navantis has built its own replication engine aimed at dramatically increasing the scalability of the SharePoint portal solution. The company was awarded several honors at Microsoft's Fusion show for a scalable mission-critical financial transaction system that some observers doubted could be done with Microsoft's .Net platform.

The Navantis offering arrives as many portal vendors are moving downstream to the SMB market. IBM, for example, released WebSphere Portal Express and Portal Express Plus with additional collaboration capabilities, which is scheduled to ship at the end of the month. The Plus edition adds collaboration technologies from IBM's Lotus Software group, said Larry Bowden, vice president of portals at IBM.

IBM executives said the pricing puts the offerings squarely into contention with Microsoft SharePoint Portal Server for companies with fewer than 2,000 users. Microsoft, however, discounts those claims.

Pricing for the base IBM version is $77 per intranet user, with a limit of 2,000 users per server. For extranet use, the product costs $30,000 per CPU, supporting up to four CPUs. For more than 2,000 users, IBM recommends an enterprise version of the product.

WebSphere Portal Express Plus is $122 per intranet user, up to 2,000 portal users, and $47,820 per processor for extranet use, also with the four-processor limit.

Entry-level SharePoint pricing for 25 users is $6,699, or $268 per user, and only falls to $77 per user in volumes of more than 2,000.

"They're citing one-off pricing. There are so many programs,Open, Select, Enterprise Agreements,that bring our pricing much lower," said Nancy McSharry Jensen, group product manager for SharePoint at Microsoft. In a volume deal, SharePoint can cost as little as $44,000 for 2,000 users.

She said with Version 2 of SharePoint Portal Server, due next year, Microsoft will make deployment more flexible, making it easy for corporate, or top-down driven sites, and grassroots-driven team sites, to be integrated.

IBM claims its software, which is packaged on four CDs, can be installed with five clicks.

The SMB market is clearly the technology hot spot right now. Research firm IDC has said 54 percent of technology spending next year will come from companies with fewer than 1,000 employees.