Open Text, Red Hat, Backbase Pressuring Leaders For a Piece of the Portal Market

By David Roe (@druadh20) Oct 15, 2010

Earlier on this week we took a look at the recently released Magic Quadrant for Horizontal Portals from Gartner (news, site). While there was considerable interest in the leaders, there were also a number of other companies including Open Text and Red Hat JBoss that made it onto the list for other reasons.

The market for portals is powered by the need to improve collaboration across the enterprise and extend business processes and applications to wider audiences.

The Magic Quadrant report shows that with a shift towards Web 2.0, cloud and consumer facing portals, the number of viable vendors has dropped from more than 50 in 2003 to less than a dozen in 2010.

The companies that are best able to provide portals to do that include IBM, Liferay, Microsoft, Oracle and SAP. These, according to Gartner, provide a wide range of capabilities to enable portal deployment and have shown themselves capable of meeting customers’ needs over a long period of time.

The enterprises that didn’t make it into the leaders list include those that are identified as challengers, visionaries and niche players. So here, in alphabetical order, are the others.

Challengers

These are companies that Gartner says showed significant ability to execute and deploy portals, but lack the same level of portal-specific vision shown by those in the market leader space. They include:

1. Open Text

While Open Text (news, site) is the largest independent vendor of enterprise content management in the group, Gartner says it has shown a reluctance to enter the portal market and seems happy to appear as a complement rather than competition to its partners and competitors.

When it bought Vignette in 2009, it also bought portal technology. Although it offers it as a standalone, more usually it markets it as part of its ECM, or web engagement management suite, which targets intranets and customer facing portals.

Strengths: With a number of acquisitions under its belt, Open Text has deep vertical offerings that are now established in many large organizations in a customer-facing role. It has also established strong partnerships with heavyweights like Microsoft (news, site) and SAP (news, site) that could help it extend its reach beyond its current market. Open Text fits in well with the emerging UXP market.
Cautions: Following the acquisition of Vignette, Gartner says, portal customers noted a lack of responsiveness to them in the period directly after the acquisition. Gartner adds that — based on interactions with its customers — Open Text's Portal is considered for replacement more frequently than most other portal software.

2. Red Hat JBoss

As the commercial version of the open source GateIn community portal, Red Hat's JBoss Enterprise Portal is the result of a partnership between it and eXo (news, site) which fills content and collaboration feature gaps in Red Hat's (news, site) portal.