Research

Publication Date: 17 September 2009 ID Number: G00170709

Magic Quadrant for Horizontal Portals

David Gootzit, Gene Phifer, Ray Valdes, Eric Knipp

Buying activity in the horizontal portals market is increasingly focused on a core group of
large-enterprise software vendors and open-source alternatives. Vendors differentiate
themselves based on social computing and mashup functionality, as well as on moving
toward WOA-based architectures.

© 2009 Gartner, Inc. and/or its Affiliates. All Rights Reserved. Reproduction and distribution of this publication in any form
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omissions or inadequacies in the information contained herein or for interpretations thereof. The opinions expressed herein
are subject to change without notice.
WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW

Open Text's acquisition of Vignette in July 2009 and Oracle's pending acquisition of Sun
Microsystems continue the horizontal portal market's trend toward vendor consolidation. Most
new horizontal portal projects are being launched based on a narrowing list of horizontal portal
vendors. Some open-source horizontal portal and portal-as-a-service options provide alternatives
for enterprises unwilling to invest with the enterprise software megavendors increasingly
dominating this space.
Through August 2009, new portal deals were dominated by a core group of high-profile,
enterprise-focused software vendors. In over 400 inquiries taken by members of the Gartner
portal team since the publication of the 2008 horizontal portal Magic Quadrant, Microsoft, IBM,
Oracle and, to a lesser extent, SAP, have been the most frequently asked-about megavendors in
horizontal portal inquiries. At least one of these vendors is mentioned in over 75% of new portal
vendor selection calls. On the open-source front, Liferay has been raised by Gartner clients
during this period as an open-source portal they're considering over twice as often as the Red
Hat JBoss portal.
Liferay and Red Hat JBoss, the two commercial open-source horizontal portal vendors profiled in
this research, continue to benefit from the economic turmoil that has constrained IT budgets for
much of 2008 and 2009. While these vendors have yet to prove themselves across the full range
of portal deployment scenarios, large enterprises have increasingly been attracted to using them
for new portal projects, even in some cases where large-scale investment in incumbent portal
products exists. Although other commercial, open-source, horizontal portal vendors and
numerous open-source, horizontal portal initiatives exist, Liferay and Red Hat have achieved the
most enterprise penetration of open-source horizontal portals, and are the only open-source
portal alternatives that meet our market inclusion criteria.
In addition to playing a major role in many on-premises horizontal portal evaluations, Microsoft
has fueled market interest in portal-as-a-service with SharePoint Online. Gartner's research
indicates that large-enterprise use of SharePoint Online has focused on the SharePoint Online
Dedicated offering, rather than SharePoint Online Standard. This portal consumption mechanism
actually represents a different model than the portal-as-a-service consumption mechanism (see
"Portals in the Cloud Will Take Five Forms"). While functional capabilities differ today between
SharePoint Online Standard and SharePoint Online Dedicated (see "SharePoint Online:
Microsoft's Collaboration Platform in the Sky"), Microsoft hopes to eliminate these differences
with the release of SharePoint Server 2010. Although no other megavendor has announced a
portal-as-service offering in 2009, several, including IBM, offer ways to exploit the cloud in
conjunction with their horizontal portal solutions. Mitigating revenue cannibalization will be a
challenge for long-standing horizontal portal vendors launching software-as-a-service (SaaS)
initiatives.
While Google has yet to specifically target the horizontal portal space, end-user interest in this
vendor's intentions remains high. However, enterprises looking for a portal-as-a-service solution
shouldn't limit their search to the megavendors. Covisint delivers identity and access
management and horizontal portal features as a portal-as-a-service.
Organizations evaluating portal functionality generally consider vendors with experience in
business applications or software infrastructures. In some cases, this heritage dictates areas of
functional strength and weakness that are important to consider in any evaluation. Selecting a
horizontal portal product requires a careful vendor evaluation to make appropriate trade-offs
among functional capabilities, architectural fit and strategic direction. Use Gartner's Magic

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Quadrant in combination with other tools, including analyst consultations, when selecting a
horizontal portal.
This Magic Quadrant for horizontal portals evaluates 12 vendors, the same number of vendors as
in 2008. Open Text replaces Vignette, based on its acquisition of that vendor, and Open Text
indicates that it intends to carry forward with Vignette's portal technology. As of 15 September
2009, Oracle's pending acquisition of Sun Microsystems remains unclosed, so Sun continues to
be treated as an independent entity for the purposes of this analysis.

STRATEGIC PLANNING ASSUMPTION(S)

By 2011, Gartner expects at least 15% of new enterprise portal projects in Global 2000 firms to
use open-source horizontal portal frameworks.
By 2014, horizontal portal products based on portal containers will be used for no more than 60%
of new enterprise portal projects.

MAGIC QUADRANT

Figure 1. Magic Quadrant for Horizontal Portal Products

Source: Gartner (September 2009)

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Market Overview
The horizontal portal market experienced two major consolidation waves from 2001 to 2003 and
from 2005 to 2007. It now seems that a third, more-moderate vendor consolidation started in
2008, driven by Oracle and Open Text. After acquiring BEA Systems in 2008, Oracle announced
a deal to acquire Sun in April 2009. While Open Text previously acquired portal and enterprise
content management (ECM) vendor Hummingbird in 2006, it didn't pursue Hummingbird's portal
technology. With its acquisition of Vignette, Open Text gets a second chance to pursue the
horizontal portal space, and Open Text has indicated that it intends to continue development of
Vignette's application portal technology as a stand-alone horizontal portal offering.
The horizontal portal market has coalesced around a core group of large independent software
vendors (ISVs). Over 60% of new portal investment and portal technology replacement activities
involve one or more of the following four vendors: IBM, Microsoft, Oracle and SAP. This
competition among stack vendors during a time of economic uncertainty when many enterprises
seek to focus investment around fewer vendors isn't surprising. Yet, enterprise interest in Liferay,
which doesn't claim to provide an entire stack or service-oriented architecture (SOA)
environment, means that opportunities continue to exist for at least some smaller, portal-focused
vendors. Portals play strategic roles in the stack strategies of several large ISVs. Microsoft Office
SharePoint Server (MOSS) 2007 plays a central role in the company's information worker
strategy. WebSphere Portal plays an important role in IBM's productivity and its SOA visions.
WebCenter Framework serves not only as the newest component of Oracle's portal strategy, but
also as the foundation for its next-generation Fusion applications' user interfaces (UIs).
Gartner sees a shift in the dynamics of a horizontal portal market driven by the combination of
enterprise-grade, open-source alternatives with cloud computing. Although the portal-as-a-service
model is the most frequently thought of intersection between portals and cloud computing, this
phenomenon's impact isn't limited to that consumption mechanism for portal functionality. Cloud
computing specifically could drive an increase in the number of options for portal functionality.
Additional open-source portal alternatives could still gain traction in enterprise settings. Portal
megavendors are threatened by and are benefiting from these two forces. In some cases, they
will offer new technologies in parallel with their established on-premises portal products.
The impact of Oracle's acquisition of BEA Systems continues to affect the competitive dynamics
of the horizontal portal space, but two additional trends must be noted:

• There has been increasing interest in and significant adoption of Microsoft Office MOSS
2007, including in some portal deployment scenarios where Microsoft's previous portal
offerings weren't seriously considered.

• In 2009, enterprise interest in open-source portal alternatives for a broadening set of

portal deployment scenarios expanded. While Gartner doesn't yet view open-source
portal alternatives as proven for all portal deployment scenarios, Liferay and Red Hat
JBoss are increasingly being used for some portal projects that traditionally had been
viewed as only achievable with commercial portal options.
By 2011, Gartner expects at least 15% of new enterprise portal projects in Global 2000 firms to
use open-source horizontal portal frameworks. As expected, the Sun-Liferay agreement (see
"Sun and Liferay Plan to Brighten Open-Source Enterprise Portals"), and the completion of the
second generation of vendor-independent portlet standards, including Web Services for Remote
Portlets (WSRP v.2) and Java Specification Request (JSR) 286, has been partly responsible for
enterprise interest in open-source portal alternatives. However, economic forces limiting IT
budgets have played a large role in forcing enterprises to carefully re-examine some of their
assumptions about open-source technologies.

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General interest in Web 2.0 (see "Key Issues for Web 2.0 and Beyond, 2009") continues to drive
interest in portal projects, and is heavily influencing portal vendors' functionality road maps (see
"Generation Six Portal Products: When Portals Meet Web 2.0, It's Love at First Sight") Some
horizontal portal vendors delivered mashup functionality in 2008, but more have used 2009 to
deliver or announce intentions to deliver enterprise mashup functionality. Portal-based or portal-
complimenting mashup functionality and social-computing features will be areas of differentiation
among portal vendors through 2010.
Several enterprise software vendors in related markets, including several that target business
process management (BPM) suites (BPMSs), provide some functionality traditionally associated
with horizontal portals. We're seeing some of the megavendors use "process portals" as a
marketing approach, and we may see some BPMS players pursue this messaging as well.
Alternatives have emerged to portal containers, the heart of the horizontal portal approach, to
create enterprise Web environments. Mashups, lightweight composite applications based on
Web-oriented architectures (WOAs), and social-networking tools are three of the approaches that
could be used to build a portal-less portal (see "Get Ready for the 'Portal-Less' Portal"). We're
entering an important period for enterprise architects evaluating the approaches to building
enterprise Web presences. By 2014, horizontal portal products based on portal containers will be
used for no more than 60% of new enterprise portal projects.

Market Definition/Description
Gartner defines a portal as a "Web software infrastructure that provides access to, and interaction
with, relevant information assets (for example, information/content, applications and business
processes), knowledge assets and human assets by select targeted audiences, delivered in a
highly personalized manner." Enterprise portals may face different audiences, including:

• Employees — business-to-employee (B2E)

• Customers — business-to-consumer (B2C)

• Business partners —B2B

Of course, the government corollaries to these three high-level audience types are also
considered applicable. A portal product is a packaged software application that is used to create
and maintain enterprise portals. These products can be used to design vertical or horizontal
portals:

• Vertical portals focus on accessing specific applications or business functions.

• Horizontal portals seek to integrate and aggregate information from multiple cross-
enterprise applications, as well as specific line-of-business tools and applications.

Inclusion and Exclusion Criteria

To be considered for the 2009 Magic Quadrant for horizontal portal products, vendors must meet
six minimum criteria:

• The vendor must have the ability to provide technology supporting deployment in a
variety of scenarios, including employee, partner and customer/constituent-facing
portals.

• The vendor must provide portal functionality that meets all Generation 1 and Generation
2 criteria, as defined in previously published Gartner materials (see "Portals Are the
'Swiss Army Knives of Enterprise Software").

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 • The vendor must provide sales and support for the portal product in at least two of the
following five geographic regions: North America; Latin America; Europe, the Middle
East and Africa; Japan; and the Asia/Pacific region.

• The vendor must support clients in more than one vertical industry.

• The vendor must have achieved at least $4 million in annual, portal-related product and
service revenue during the 2008 calendar year.

• At least five distinct enterprises (Gartner clients and nonclients included) must have
raised the vendor's name proactively within the context of a horizontal portal discussion
with Gartner analysts during 2008.

Added
Open Text replaces Vignette in this Magic Quadrant, based on Open Text's acquisition of
Vignette.

Dropped
As a result of its acquisition by Open Text on 21 July 2009, Vignette isn't included in this year's
analysis. Open Text has indicated that it plans to continue investment in the Vignette Application
Portal and to continue to sell it (see "Open Text Pads Its ECM Portfolio With Vignette Buy").
Oracle's planned acquisition of Sun is expected to close, but until this occurs, Sun should be
considered an independent entity. Sun will bring a fifth portal to Oracle's portal catalog, as well as
raising the question of whether Oracle will continue Sun's relationship with Liferay (see "Sun
Middleware Under New Management: What to Expect").

Evaluation Criteria
Ability to Execute
Enterprises evaluating horizontal portal technologies have wide-ranging requirements for different
audiences. A breadth of functionality supporting different portal deployment scenarios, long-term
vendor viability, a demonstrated track record of meeting customer needs and a successfully
expanding market presence are all important criteria for the ability to execute in this market. A
vendor that may not be rated highly in terms of its ability to execute in the general horizontal
portal space may still provide compelling or leading-edge functionality supporting a particular
portal deployment scenario or companies in a particular industry.
Product/Service: This criterion addresses technology providers' core portal offerings' features.
Assessments in this area include options that promote rapid deployment of the offering, as well
as the offerings' demonstrated scalability, manageability and security.
Overall Viability (Business Unit, Financial, Strategy, Organization): Overall viability includes
an assessment of the overall organization's financial health, the financial and practical success of
the business unit and the likelihood of the individual business unit to continue to invest in the
product, and to continue offering the product and advancing the state of the art within the
organization's portfolio of products. Assessments of the organization's cash and equity position,
management and financial strategy are weighed.
Sales Execution/Pricing: This addresses the technology providers' capabilities in all presales
activities and the structures that support them. It includes deal management, pricing and
negotiation, presales support and the overall effectiveness of the sales channel. Assessments of

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the quality of the technology providers' sales forces, their demonstrated market shares, and their
pricing strategies are included.
Market Responsiveness and Track Record: This is the vendor's ability to respond, change
direction, be flexible and achieve competitive success as opportunities develop, competitors act,
customer needs evolve, and market dynamics change. This criterion considers the provider's
history of responsiveness, or its track record in the portal space. It also weighs the range of large
enterprise customers using the portal offering and product viability issues.
Marketing Execution: This criterion addresses the clarity, quality, creativity and efficacy of
programs designed to deliver the organization's message in order to influence the market,
promote the brand and business, increase awareness of the products and establish a positive
identification with the product/brand and organization in the minds of buyers. Product revenue,
organizational "mind share," and the health of partner and alliance programs are all considered.
Customer Experience: This is the vendor's relationships, products and services/programs that
enable clients to be successful with the products evaluated. Specifically, it includes the ways
customers receive technical support or account support. This can include ancillary tools,
customer support programs (and the quality thereof), availability of user groups and service-level
agreements.
Operations: This is the ability of the organization to meet its goals and commitments. Factors
include the quality of the product management team, service and support organization, developer
organization skill sets and other vehicles that enable the organization to operate effectively and
efficiently on an ongoing basis.
Please note that the weightings for one Ability to Execute criterion have changed since the 2008
Magic Quadrant process. The weighting for Overall Viability is decreasing from high to standard.
This reflects the impact of multiple waves of vendor consolidations in this market. Most vendors in
the Magic Quadrant are large, publicly traded companies. While overall viability differences still
matter, the relative disparity among most of the players has reduced this criterion in importance in
decision making, given the state of the market (see Table 1).

Table 1. Ability to Execute Evaluation Criteria

Evaluation Criteria Weighting
Product/Service high
Overall Viability (Business Unit, Financial, Strategy, standard
Organization)
Sales Execution/Pricing standard
Market Responsiveness and Track Record high
Marketing Execution high
Customer Experience high
Operations standard
Source: Gartner (September 2009)

Completeness of Vision
Vendors demonstrating an understanding of their customers' evolving needs, incorporating new
customer demands into their product strategies and exhibiting technological innovation in their
portal products exhibit completeness of vision in this market.

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Market Understanding: This criterion addresses the ability of the technology provider to
understand buyers' needs and translate these needs into products and services. Vendors that
show the highest degree of vision listen and understand buyers' wants and needs, and can shape
or enhance those wants with their added vision. This criterion includes the vendors' vision for
portal technology and for incorporating Gartner's Generation 6 functionality.
Marketing Strategy: This criterion deals with clear, differentiated set of messages consistently
communicated throughout the organization and externalized through the website, advertising,
customer programs and positioning statements. A clear marketing strategy is increasingly
important in the portal space to differentiate between horizontal portal offerings and other
approaches to building Web presences.
Sales Strategy: This is the strategy for selling product that uses the appropriate network of direct
and indirect sales, marketing, service and communication affiliates that extend the scope and
depth of market reach, skills, expertise, technologies, services and the customer base. In
situations where the vendor offers more than one portal product or a portal product, along with
products that provide alternative ways to build enterprise Web presences, avoiding channel
conflict is also important.
Offering (Product) Strategy: This criterion addresses a technology provider's approach to
product development and delivery that emphasizes differentiation, functionality, methodology and
feature set as they map to current and future requirements for integration, standards support,
collaboration, development environment support, personalization capabilities, architectural
evolution and feature enrichment. The vendors' abilities to effectively benefit from the open-
source movement are also considered, although this can take forms besides offering a portal
under an open-source license.
Business Model: This is the soundness and logic of a technology provider's underlying business
proposition.
Vertical/Industry Strategy: This is the technology provider's strategy to direct resources, skills
and offerings to meet the specific needs of individual market segments and vertical industries.
Innovation: This criterion addresses direct, related, complementary and synergistic layouts of
resources, expertise or capital for investment, consolidation, defensive or pre-emptive purposes.
In the horizontal portal space, innovation can occur in terms of enterprise mashups, composite
applications, rich Internet applications (Ajax, etc.), providing the portal as a set of services, social
software and cloud computing.
Geographic Strategy: This is the technology provider's strategy to direct resources, skills and
offerings to meet the specific needs of geographies outside the "home" or native geography,
either directly or through partners, channels and subsidiaries, as appropriate for that geography
and market.
Please note that two Completeness of Vision criteria changed in weighting from the 2008
horizontal portal Magic Quadrant to reflect changes in the market. The weighting for Sales
Strategy increased from low to standard to reflect the increasing important of effective sales
execution in the current economic environment. The weighting for Vertical/Industry Strategy
decreased from high to standard to reflect declining differences in the adoption of core portal
technologies across vertical industries. While important adoption differences remain, they aren't
as significant as in the past (see Table 2).

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Table 2. Completeness of Vision Evaluation Criteria
Evaluation Criteria Weighting
Market Understanding High
Marketing Strategy High
Sales Strategy standard
Offering (Product) Strategy High
Business Model Low
Vertical/Industry Strategy standard
Innovation High
Geographic Strategy standard
Source: Gartner (September 2009)

Leaders
The leaders in this Magic Quadrant have a full range of capabilities to support a variety of portal
deployment scenarios, and have demonstrated consistent product delivery in meeting customer
needs for a substantial period of time. Leaders have delivered significant product innovation over
the course of their pursuit of portal customers, and have been successful in selling to new
customers across industries. IBM, Microsoft, Oracle and SAP demonstrate leadership in the
horizontal portal space.

Challengers
Challengers in this Magic Quadrant demonstrate significant ability to execute, but lack the degree
of portal-specific vision demonstrated by market leaders. Red Hat JBoss and Open Text are
challengers. Red Hat JBoss demonstrates execution across several industries. It also has
significant market penetration in North America, Europe and Latin America, but hasn't yet
demonstrated vision similar to that of the market leaders. Open Text's acquisition of Vignette
provides it with a strong portal technology, but Vignette's pace of portal innovation has slowed
and Open Text will have to apply greater resources to recapture the product's past traction in the
portal space.

Visionaries
Liferay, Tibco Software, Covisint and Sun are visionaries in this year's Magic Quadrant. Tibco has
exhibited vision in its pursuit of mashup functionality within the portal, as well as complementary
portal offerings like PageBus, but hasn't exhibited the scope of delivery or the market presence of
the leaders. Liferay exhibits vision across a range of portal functionality, but it's a small company
lacking the market presence and execution resources of the leaders. Both Tibco and Liferay were
visionaries last year. Covisint enters the Visionary quadrant for the first time. It's expanding its
capabilities across industries, and is increasing the scope of its horizontal portal offerings. Sun
has dropped into the Visionary quadrant from the Leaders quadrant. While it continues to
demonstrate some strong vision aspects, its WebSpaces offering — based on Liferay Portal —
hasn't captured significant market traction.

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Niche Players
The niche vendors in the horizontal portal product market focus on a limited set of portal
deployment scenarios, have limited geographic presence outside their home markets or focus on
a narrow set of industries.

Vendor Strengths and Cautions

BroadVision
BroadVision has been focusing its efforts on B2C portal deployment scenarios over the past year.
While Business Agility Suite can be used in scenarios other than B2C environments, BroadVision
has significantly de-emphasized B2E and B2B use cases — other than self-service scenarios —
as components of its strategy. In the past, BroadVision's B2C capabilities were a source of
competitive differentiation, but its market advantage in e-commerce specifically and B2C portals
in general has been reduced over the past 18 months by competitors' moves. BroadVision's most
recent portal functionality is included in Business Agility Suite 8.2.

Strengths
• BroadVision offers strong functionality supporting B2C portal deployments, especially
those with an e-commerce component.

• The visual drag-and-drop style of application development delivered by BroadVision's

Kukini workbench can allow lower-skilled developers to build portals.

Cautions
• While BroadVision experienced quarterly software license growth in Q209 on a year-
over-year basis, its software revenue has been declining over the past three years. It
does have sufficient cash on hand to continue operations if the operating margins it
experienced from Q108 through Q209 remain constant or improve.

• BroadVision still lacks portal-specific standards support for JSR 286 or WSRP v.2, and
has made no specific commitment to support either portlet standard.

• BroadVision's pace of portal-specific innovation has slowed significantly, with few

horizontal portal features added in 2009 and continuing gaps in Generation 4 and
Generation 5 horizontal portal functionality.

Covisint
Covisint has benefited greatly from increased interest in cloud computing models of application
delivery, and has been experiencing increased interest in its portal-as-a-service offerings targeted
at specific vertical industries and for use in horizontal B2E scenarios. The company focuses on
marketing its SaaS portal by vertical industry, where its products are typically used in B2B and
B2C scenarios; however, over the past year, the company has also placed new emphasis on B2E
portals. Covisint offers a robust security and identity management model, supplementing it with
off-the-shelf software from both open-source and commercial vendors to deliver its SaaS product.
This architecture necessitates a commitment to WOA and representational state transfer (REST)
principles, which provide value for customers using the Covisint portal as an integration hub.

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Strengths
• Gartner has collected empirical evidence showing that SaaS enables faster
deployments, and Covisint offers one of the few SaaS horizontal portal options on the
market.

• Covisint's offerings include integrated security features such as user administration,

provisioning, user access, and identity verification and federation, as well as federated
search using the industry-leading FAST enterprise search platform.

• Covisint acquires off-the-shelf, open-source and commercial technology as

underpinnings for its SaaS offerings, making it possible for a single vendor to seek out
and deliver a best-of-breed blend of technologies to augment its own capabilities in
areas like federated identity management.

Cautions
• Much of Covisint's experience is in offering vertical-specific portal functionality for four
industries: automotive, healthcare, government and financial services, which can create
competition with Covisint customers targeting these markets themselves.

• Covisint does not include enterprise mashup capabilities in its portal, but some Covisint
customers have created portal-based composite applications and Covisint is exploring
third-party technologies that could be integrated into its portal platform.

• SaaS delivery, combined with Covisint's software assembly strategy, introduces

challenges in development of new applications for the portal.

Fujitsu
Fujitsu is a large, financially strong, global IT services, hardware and support provider offering a
complete middleware stack that enjoys a strong position in its Japanese home market. Fujitsu's
portal product is Interstage Portal, with the most recent shipping version of release 9.1. Enterprise
use of Interstage Portal as a horizontal portal outside of Japan is very limited, but Interstage
portal is included with Fujtisu's BPM offering, which has wider adoption in North America and
EMEA.

Strengths
• Fujitsu ties its portal strategy to its overall middleware strategy by focusing on the portal
as the UI for an SOA environment.

• Recently added support for Ajax and a mashup framework closes a major gap in
functionality, and facilitates improved UIs and rapid composite development.

Cautions
• Despite annual statements that it intends to actively sell the Interstage product family
globally, Fujitsu has achieved little market penetration outside Japan, other than limited
success in international subsidiaries of Japanese companies.

• Fujitsu's annual portal revenue from horizontal portal scenarios remains flat, Gartner
estimates it as approximately $5 million.

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 • Fujitsu Interstage Portal has no support for and no plans to support advanced portal
standards (e.g., JSR 286 and WSRP v.2), and lags behind competitors in leading
features like social software and cloud capabilities.

IBM
IBM is a large, global technology and services provider, with extensive presence in large and
midsize enterprises. It is a leading horizontal portal vendor, and continues to invest directly in the
product and in complementary Accelerator offerings. WebSphere Portal supports mashup
creation (via IBM Mashup Center), and leverages other complementary offerings, including Lotus
Web Content Management and Lotus Connections (for social networking), to inject Web 2.0
technologies into the enterprise. IBM effectively links WebSphere Portal to its compelling vision
for unified application compositing and deployment across a variety of UIs. Recently, IBM
announced the development and deployment of the WebSphere Portal Server in the Amazon
Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) Platform. IBM's current technology in this space is
WebSphere Portal 6.1, although this is sold under several packages, including WebSphere Portal
Enable and Extend.

Strengths
• WebSphere Portal continues a long track record of successful deployments by a large
customer base across a wide range of complex deployment scenarios, including high-
scalability environments.

• WebSphere Portal has a full range of portal complementary technologies (e.g., content
management, mashups, social computing and collaboration, security and management),
as well as a large partner ecosystem.

• IBM has created a series of "accelerators" that provide prebuilt templates, workflow and
default deployment settings tailored for different business and user scenarios, which
reduces deployment times.

• IBM has retooled its small or midsize business (SMB) market strategy with the Portal
NOW program, which uses IBM's partner ecosystem to rapidly deploy portal functionality
to SMB enterprises. Initial feedback from enterprises contracting with system integrators
delivering Portal NOW indicates shorter deployment times for WebSphere Portal Server-
based, content-centric portals than have historically been the case.

Cautions
• While installation times have improved with WebSphere Portal 6.1, configuration for
more-complex portal projects can result in extended deployment times in some
scenarios, and WebSphere Portal remains one of the more difficult portal products to
deploy.

• WebSphere Portal is based on the WebSphere platform, and requires a significant

investment in that technology and the related skill sets.

• Customers and prospects continue to report confusion with IBM's Processor Value Unit
pricing methodology.

Liferay
Liferay continues to rapidly gain market traction and visibility out of proportion with the company's
small size, due to its open-source licensing model. Its aggressive fast-follower approach to
implementing support for portlet standards plays a role in its success, as does its aggressive

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embedding of social-software functions. Liferay has been gaining traction partly at the expense of
some established portal players. This is partly due to market perceptions that open-source
alternatives represent lower-cost means of delivering portals during a recession. The May 2008
agreement with Sun reduced the perceptions of risk associated with a small open-source portal
vendor. However, the pending acquisition of Sun by Oracle means this relationship will evolve
significantly, potentially including dissolution. As a commercial open-source company, Liferay
faces challenges in monetizing enterprise use of Liferay Portal code, so its resources could
remain constrained even as market adoption of Liferay Portal accelerates further. Liferay Portal
5.2 is its current offering.

Strengths
• Enterprises leveraging the Liferay Community Edition view the open-source licensed
portal as delivering highly favorable time to value based on the ability to quickly deploy
core portal functionality without software license procurements.

• Liferay Portal 5.2 and Liferay Social Office reflect Liferay's continued aggressive efforts
to provide social-networking capabilities integrated with a horizontal portal.

• Liferay Portal 5.2 has aggressively embraced a portal services approach, with users
providing the option to push some portal functionality into nonportal Web applications.

Cautions
• Liferay's personalization features aren't as robust as many commercial portal
alternatives, primarily due to its lack of a rule engine.

• Liferay hasn't yet built a long track record of large-scale, transaction-focused portals.
Many Liferay deployments support B2E or B2C content-centric scenarios.

• Liferay offers comparatively few prebuilt portlets to connect to commonly used business
applications, content management systems and collaboration tools.

• Liferay lacks an extensive implementation partner network.

Microsoft
Microsoft has enjoyed significant adoption of MOSS by enterprises, and is a leading horizontal
portal vendor. MOSS 2007 is an integrated portal/content/collaboration platform used to create
and operate a wide variety of Web and portal sites. Adoption of MOSS for portal purposes has
historically been most common among enterprises with fewer than 15,000 employees and for
B2E purposes. However, in 2009, MOSS has more examples of deployments meeting a wider
range of portal use cases, and has become more pronounced in larger enterprises. Microsoft has
successfully fostered initial MOSS 2007 deployments through Enterprise Licensing agreements,
but these agreements rarely cover all the MOSS 2007 client access licenses an organization
would need for all employees, thus giving Microsoft significant upsell opportunities. Widespread
interest and adoption of MOSS means that locating resources for new projects may be time-
consuming and costly. The widespread interest in MOSS 2007 has attracted a large partner
ecosystem, including solution providers basing their own offerings on a MOSS foundation. The
run-up to the launch of SharePoint 2010 has begun, and many MOSS 2007 users are eager for
guidance on migration planning and on public commitments regarding features beyond the July
2009 technical preview.

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Strengths
• Microsoft's continuing efforts to provide increasing numbers of site templates for
TeamSites and Content Publishing Sites are bearing fruit, as larger numbers of
enterprises are leveraging them to speed up their MOSS deployments.

• While use of Team Sites and Content Publishing sites in support of a portal deployment
are more common than deployment of MySites, MOSS MySites can serve as a first step
for enterprises toward implementation of some social-computing functionality.
Integrating Office Communication Server with MySites is proving a compelling
combination in some enterprises.

• The SharePoint Online Standard offering represents the first attempt by a leading
horizontal portal product vendor to provide a SaaS horizontal portal. SharePoint Online
Standard is still inadequate for most horizontal portal scenarios, but shows promise for
departmental-level portal requirements. SharePoint Online Dedicated is being leveraged
by some large enterprises for collaboration and content-centric B2E portals.

• Microsoft's market penetration of MOSS has spurred the development of a WebPart

aftermarket. While enterprises need to test third-party WebPart and plan for the impact
that a potential SharePoint 2010 migration might have on third-party-developed
WebPart, this type of aftermarket can help enterprises constrain WebPart development
costs.

Cautions
• MOSS 2007 does not offer full support for enterprise mashups or social networking,
although improvements are clearly intended based on feedback from those who've
evaluated the SharePoint 2010 technical preview. MySites are useful, but MOSS 2007
doesn't represent a full enterprise social-networking platform.

• Microsoft continues to rely on partners to provide what many larger enterprises consider
core functionality for a mission-critical enterprise-level system. Lack of content
replication features among independently configured MOSS installations and MOSS's
lack of native site-level backup and recovery capabilities are some examples.

• MOSS is not yet being widely deployed for high-volume, transactional portals. Although
some organizations pursue custom WebPart creation for applications access, the
inability of Business Data Catalog (BDC) to support bidirectional data input to back-end
business applications has led to comparatively little BDC use in enterprise MOSS
deployments. Users of the technical preview release of SharePoint 2010 report that
BDC is evolving to include bidirectional capabilities as a feature set described as Basic
Connectivity Services. The addition of meaningful bidirectional capabilities should
significantly increase the use of SharePoint as an application platform.

• Large-enterprise MOSS users with complex deployments indicate that Microsoft's

support structures are still experiencing some challenges in meeting the demand from
larger MOSS customers for documentation and frontline technical support. However,
over the last year, Microsoft invested significantly in improving its support, including the
creation of a Customer Advisory Team for its largest customers.

Open Text
Open Text acquired Vignette on 21 July 2009. Due to decreasing market share and lagging
product execution in certain key areas, the combined entity has shifted in the portal space from a

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leader to a challenger. It should be noted that the acquisition improves the ability to execute of
this option in this market, but the vision demonstrated by Vignette before the acquisition justifies a
shift to the Challenger quadrant. The Vignette Application Portal represents one of the few areas
where Vignette and Open Text's product portfolios didn't overlap, so it would make sense for
Open Text to continue with the product. Open Text has indicated to Gartner and select customers
its intention to continue development of the Vignette Application Portal, although no public
commitments regarding product packaging and commitments to previously published Vignette
Portal road maps have yet been made. Open Text has publicly committed to the delivery of
Vignette Application Portal 8.0, and has indicated to Gartner and select customers its intention to
continue product development over the long term. Beyond this disclosure, Open Text has made
no public statements regarding product packaging or commitments to previously published
Vignette Portal road maps, as of the middle of September.

Strengths
• Open Text's Vignette Portal has proven scalability, and is the foundation for several
high-demand B2C portals.

• A significant installed base for Open Text's wide range of ECM offerings provides a
ready-made market for cross-selling Vignette Portal to these enterprises.

• Open Text's Vignette Portal can be tightly integrated with Vignette Content Management
to offer a strong, tightly integrated product for enterprises looking for a combination of
leading content creation capabilities and a portal-based delivery mechanism.

Cautions
• Although Open Text's Vignette Application Portal has demonstrated its suitability for
portal-based composite applications, Vignette trails several competitors in supporting
end-user enterprise mashup creation and in incorporating RESTful integration
approaches. Vignette offers some social-computing features, including blogs, wikis and
tagging facilitates, but it also trails several portal competitors' overall social-computing
capabilities.

• Prior to the Open Text acquisition, Vignette experienced declining market share for
Vignette Application Portal in 2008. It was facing challenges in expanding its portal
customer base.

• Open Text's Vignette Application Portal is used by many customers for B2E scenarios,
but Vignette's overall marketing focus prior to acquisition was increasingly focused on
externally facing portals. Open Text will need to carefully assess its marketing strategy
for the portal going forward.

Oracle
Partially through the acquisition of BEA Systems, Oracle has built a major market presence in the
portal space and is a leading horizontal portal vendor. Oracle WebLogic Portal (formerly BEA
WebLogic Portal), Oracle WebCenter Framework, Oracle WebCenter Interaction (formerly BEA
AquaLogic User Interaction [ALUI]) and Oracle Portal can be used to build horizontal portals; they
overlap significantly. Oracle offers them through two bundles: Oracle WebCenter Suite and
Oracle WebCenter Services (Oracle WebLogic Portal and Oracle Portal are also available as
stand-alones, outside of WebCenter Suite) Release 11g R1 of Oracle WebCenter Suite includes
several attractive features and represents the execution of Oracle's plans to incorporate
functional elements from former BEA Ensemble, Pathways and Analytics offerings, as well as the
BEA .NET Accelerator into Oracle WebCenter Services and Oracle WebCenter Suite in its Group

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Spaces and Composer capabilities. Although Oracle has publicly stated its long-term commitment
to continue support for all of its portal products, some potential and existing customers have
expressed concern over the future of certain portal technologies in the Oracle portfolio since
Oracle WebCenter Framework is positioned at the heart of Oracle's user interaction strategy in
Oracle Fusion Middleware (OFM) 11g and Oracle Fusion Application road maps. With the
pending acquisition of Sun, Oracle inherits another horizontal portal, and it remains to be seen
what, if any, use it will make of Sun's portal based on Liferay (Sun GlassFish Web Space Server).

Strengths
• The vision for the development of portal and nonportal Web applications from a common
infrastructure based on JSF development approaches, as executed in Oracle
WebCenter Framework 11g R1, provides a compelling value for enterprises.

• New Oracle WebCenter Spaces capabilities offer a single-site architecture that supports
team collaboration environments (GroupSpaces), attribute-based personalization and
individual MyPortals (Personal Spaces).

• The new Oracle WebCenter Composer and Oracle Business Dictionary features
represent a new composition capability targeted at the growing interest in enterprise
mashups.

• Oracle WebCenter Framework 11g R1 provides a unified environment for users to

interact with OFM-based applications through a variety of "channels," including Ajax,
Microsoft Office and mobile devices. Its integration with Oracle Metadata Repository
(MDS) underlying (OFM) 11g means that enterprises leveraging the overall OFM stack
won't need to maintain a separate portal metadata infrastructure.

• Oracle is an aggressive adopter of portlet-related standards, has spearheaded some

standards (JSR 301) and was an early adopter of JSR 286 (Portlet 2.0) and WSRP v.2.

Cautions
• Oracle WebCenter Framework 11g R1, the basis for Oracle's two strategic portal and
user interaction offerings (Oracle WebCenter Services and Oracle WebCenter Suite),
launched in June 2009, lacks a significant track record for transactional portals or portals
supporting large numbers of concurrent users accessing applications.

• Feedback from Oracle customers indicates that Oracle hasn't yet succeeded in clearly
communicating its plans for the evolution of the four portal and user interaction offerings
on its price list. Some Oracle customers report a mixed message from Oracle regarding
its plans for this product portfolio.

• Oracle has committed to support products in its "Continue and Converge" classification,
including Oracle Portal ALUI and WebLogic Portal, for a minimum of nine years from the
BEA acquisition. However, some existing customers, especially those on older versions
of BEA portal products, have considered migrating to a competitor's portal product,
rather than pursue WebCenter Framework as the technical foundation for their portal
projects.

Red Hat JBoss

Red Hat is the powerhouse commercial open-source vendor, one of the few open-source
software vendors that can rival close vendors in terms of market presence and stock market
capitalization. Red Hat offers a range of software infrastructure products under open-source
licenses ranging from server operating systems to a complete middleware stack, including a Java

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Platform Enterprise Edition (Java EE) application server and horizontal portal: JBoss Enterprise
Portal Platform (EPP) version 4.3. Other packages from Red Hat, such as Linux operating system
and JBoss application server, are in wide use in enterprises in a range of scenarios. By contrast,
EPP has not achieved success comparable to other Red Hat offerings. The June 2009
announcement of the merger of the JBoss portal and eXo Portal open-source initiatives lays the
groundwork for improvements in Red Hat's portal capabilities, but specific details of the future
product features aren't yet available.

Strengths
• Red Hat is a leading commercial open-source company and has a strong brand and
market presence among large enterprises.

• An open-source licensing model reduces perceived investment risks, and Red Hat's
support for important portal-related standards minimizes perceived risks of vendor lock-
in with JBoss EPP.

• There is potential synergy between JBoss EPP and o portal acquisition, especially in the
areas of UI and social computing.

Cautions
• Red Hat positions JBoss EPP as a custom development platform, rather than as an out-
of-the-box portal solution, reducing its attractiveness to companies looking for less-
complex portal products that can be rapidly implemented, albeit without the flexibility
delivered by an alternative such as Red Hat JBoss. Some of the capabilities of eXo
portal could address some of these issues.

• Red Hat's JBoss EPP requires JBoss Application Server.

• EPP trails competitors shipping product support for collaboration, integrated Web
content management and personalization.

SAP
SAP is a large, global provider of applications, infrastructure technology and services. SAP is still
a leading horizontal portal vendor, but over the past two years has increasingly shifted the
emphasis of its portal strategy to provide access to SAP applications plus functionality to extend
its applications. A segment of SAP Portal customers also use SAP Portal to support Web content
management and collaboration scenarios. SAP's portal offering is NetWeaver Portal, which is
bundled as part of the NetWeaver Platform, and is not purchasable separately. NetWeaver Portal
has some gaps when compared with other leading horizontal portal products in content
management, collaboration, social networking and enterprise mashup capability. A segment of
SAP Portal customers also uses SAP Portal to support Web content management and
collaboration scenarios. Some customers are looking to expose SAP transactions in other portals,
including MOSS 2007. The current shipping release of NetWeaver Portal is 7.0, with 7.2 expected
to ship in Q409.

Strengths
• SAP NetWeaver Portal is the best UI for providing broad Web-based access to SAP
Business Suite applications.

• NetWeaver Portal's Composite Application Framework provides the ability to quickly

build Web-Services-centric composite applications.

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 • SAP has a broad UI strategy providing situational access to SAP applications, with tools
like NetWeaver Portal, Web Dynpro, SAPGUI, Business Client, Duet and Alloy.

Cautions
• SAP has shifted from its original strategy of NetWeaver Portal being the only portal
necessary across large enterprises to one accepting the existence of other portal
technologies. While this change reflects reality, many NetWeaver Portal customers had
the original strategy in mind when they made the commitment.

• Most SAP Portal deployments are focused on providing access to SAP applications.
End-user feedback indicates that SAP Portal UI rigidity has constrained use cases for
SAP Portal, and few non-SAP business application customers use SAP Portal.

• SAP has no support for REST or public plans to implement WOA principles in
NetWeaver Portal.

Sun Microsystems
Sun Microsystems is a long-standing, business-critical systems and software company that has in
past years been challenged on both the hardware and software sides. It made a visionary
commitment to a full open-source stack, and is in the process of executing on that vision by
levering Liferay Portal as the basis for its WebSpace Server offering. Sun's declining portal
market position and financial situation prior to the Oracle acquisition have led to it being
repositioned in the Visionaries quadrant. The pending acquisition by Oracle has added
uncertainty to the future of individual items in the Sun product portfolio, especially its portal. Sun
Glassfish WebSpace Server 10 was released in February 2009, and adds some features above
and beyond what's available in Liferay Community Edition.

Strengths
• Sun's partnership with Liferay has resulted in a strong, full-featured and well-supported
offering with innovations in social computing.

• Sun WebSpace Server has demonstrated scalability in many high-demand portal

deployments.

• Sun has strong support for Java and portal standards.

Cautions
• The market interest generated by the Liferay partnership has yet to translate into
significant new sales of Sun WebSpace Server.

• The future of Sun WebSpace Server remains uncertain due to the impending acquisition
by Oracle, which already has four portal packages in its portfolio.

Tibco Software
Tibco currently offers PortalBuilder 5.3. It position PortalBuilder in terms of mashups and Ajax.
Recently, Tibco donated General Interface to the Dojo Foundation, but continues to stress its own
Ajax capabilities in its portal offering. Tibco offers a well-integrated BPM portal offering, as well as
an overall SOA vision.

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Strengths
• Tibco has continued to build out the capabilities that support its Active User Experience
vision, and has been pushing customers to leverage offerings complementary to
PortalBuilder, including Tibco PageBus, Tibco Ajax Message Service and Tibco Forms.
These products are likely to be compelling for enterprises interested in portals with
strong Ajax capabilities and end-user-driven mashup capablities.

• Tibco has been an aggressive mover in widget standards definition.

• Tibco has a demonstrated track record to meet the needs of Global 2000 enterprises for
complex integration portals and portal-BPM projects.

Cautions
• Like its early incorporation of Ajax into its portal, Tibco's functional additions to its Active
User Experience technology in the areas of PageBus and Ajax Message Service have
yet to attract large numbers of new customers for PortalBuilder. Rather, existing Tibco
customers have tended to slowly expand their investments in their Tibco portal
infrastructures by adding these modules.

• Tibco PortalBuilder suffers from limited market penetration and limited visibility. While
there are exceptions, Tibco PortalBuilder isn't commonly considered by enterprises that
aren't established Tibco customers. Gartner estimates its portal revenue from horizontal
portal deployments is only approximately $5 million.

• Tibco lags behind several competitors in social computing and collaboration

functionalities. PortalBuilder users report that Tibco still needs to improve PortalBuilder's
collaboration space functionality.

RECOMMENDED READING

"Magic Quadrants and MarketScopes: How Gartner Evaluates Vendors Within a Market"
"Generation Six Portal Products: When Portals Meet Web 2.0, It's Love at First Sight"
"Get Ready for the 'Portal-Less' Portal"
"Portals in the Cloud Will Take Five Forms"
"Context[Aware Computing: The Enterprise Portal Perspective"
"Hype Cycle for Web and User Interaction Technologies, 2009"
"Sun Middleware Under New Management: What to Expect"
"Open Text Pads Its ECM Portfolio With Vignette Buy"

Vendors Added or Dropped

We review and adjust our inclusion criteria for Magic Quadrants and MarketScopes as markets
change. As a result of these adjustments, the mix of vendors in any Magic Quadrant or
MarketScope may change over time. A vendor appearing in a Magic Quadrant or MarketScope
one year and not the next does not necessarily indicate that we have changed our opinion of that

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vendor. This may be a reflection of a change in the market and, therefore, changed evaluation
criteria, or a change of focus by a vendor.

Evaluation Criteria Definitions

Ability to Execute
Product/Service: Core goods and services offered by the vendor that compete in/serve the
defined market. This includes current product/service capabilities, quality, feature sets and skills,
whether offered natively or through OEM agreements/partnerships as defined in the market
definition and detailed in the subcriteria.
Overall Viability (Business Unit, Financial, Strategy, Organization): Viability includes an
assessment of the overall organization's financial health, the financial and practical success of
the business unit, and the likelihood that the individual business unit will continue investing in the
product, will continue offering the product and will advance the state of the art within the
organization's portfolio of products.
Sales Execution/Pricing: The vendor's capabilities in all pre-sales activities and the structure
that supports them. This includes deal management, pricing and negotiation, pre-sales support
and the overall effectiveness of the sales channel.
Market Responsiveness and Track Record: Ability to respond, change direction, be flexible
and achieve competitive success as opportunities develop, competitors act, customer needs
evolve and market dynamics change. This criterion also considers the vendor's history of
responsiveness.
Marketing Execution: The clarity, quality, creativity and efficacy of programs designed to deliver
the organization's message to influence the market, promote the brand and business, increase
awareness of the products, and establish a positive identification with the product/brand and
organization in the minds of buyers. This "mind share" can be driven by a combination of
publicity, promotional initiatives, thought leadership, word-of-mouth and sales activities.
Customer Experience: Relationships, products and services/programs that enable clients to be
successful with the products evaluated. Specifically, this includes the ways customers receive
technical support or account support. This can also include ancillary tools, customer support
programs (and the quality thereof), availability of user groups, service-level agreements and so
on.
Operations: The ability of the organization to meet its goals and commitments. Factors include
the quality of the organizational structure, including skills, experiences, programs, systems and
other vehicles that enable the organization to operate effectively and efficiently on an ongoing
basis.
Completeness of Vision
Market Understanding: Ability of the vendor to understand buyers' wants and needs and to
translate those into products and services. Vendors that show the highest degree of vision listen
to and understand buyers' wants and needs, and can shape or enhance those with their added
vision.
Marketing Strategy: A clear, differentiated set of messages consistently communicated
throughout the organization and externalized through the website, advertising, customer
programs and positioning statements.

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Sales Strategy: The strategy for selling products that uses the appropriate network of direct and
indirect sales, marketing, service and communication affiliates that extend the scope and depth of
market reach, skills, expertise, technologies, services and the customer base.
Offering (Product) Strategy: The vendor's approach to product development and delivery that
emphasizes differentiation, functionality, methodology and feature sets as they map to current
and future requirements.
Business Model: The soundness and logic of the vendor's underlying business proposition.
Vertical/Industry Strategy: The vendor's strategy to direct resources, skills and offerings to
meet the specific needs of individual market segments, including vertical markets.
Innovation: Direct, related, complementary and synergistic layouts of resources, expertise or
capital for investment, consolidation, defensive or pre-emptive purposes.
Geographic Strategy: The vendor's strategy to direct resources, skills and offerings to meet the
specific needs of geographies outside the "home" or native geography, either directly or through
partners, channels and subsidiaries as appropriate for that geography and market.

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