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Janus Boye

Questioning Oracle's Portal Leadership

22-Sep-2008

Tags: Portals and Content Integration, Marketplace at Large, Selecting Technology, WebCenter Suite

Today finds me in San Francisco for the annual Oracle OpenWorld mega-conference. Oracle claims 43,000 delegates, representing a 5% increase from last year, although according to my report from last year, they also said 43,000 in 2007. But at that size who's counting?

With Oracle's acquisition of BEA, I was in particularly interested to hear about their latest enterprise portal developments. In the opening keynote by Charles Phillips, President and Chuck Rozwat, Executive Vice President, Product Development, they did make some relevant announcements:

• A new beta release of the much-discussed but only marginally-deployed WebCenter Suite (which has seen several delays), as the product gets moved to Oracle WebLogic as the default application server
• Fusion Middleware for Cloud Computing, based on Amazon Web Services
• Oracle Beehive, a new product for enterprise collaboration, that Oracle has built from scratch with integrated security (via the SealedMedia acquisition). According to Oracle, Beehive has already been adopted by a few customers, including the European Space Agency

Enthusiastic Oracle managers also claimed market leadership in many areas, including enterprise portals, something that IBM has traditionally claimed. I don't know how they come up with this, but I do urge buyers not to put too much emphasis on any vendor claiming such a mantle.

While this week is indeed exciting for everybody in the large Oracle community, it still seems like very few customers have adopted WebCenter Suite, Oracle's strategic portal platform for the past year at least. It certainly can't be WebCenter Suite that's "leading the market."

Also, in my interviews with users of Oracle Portal (the "old" portal), it seems like quite a few are upgrading to Microsoft SharePoint, instead of going for Oracle. Interesting times indeed!