Epicentric takes portals to the next level

EPICENTRIC IS A leading provider of corporate portals and one of the first companies to advocate the adoption of Web services. Today, corporate portals are evolving into platforms for a wide range of collaborative enterprise applications. In an interview with InfoWorld Editor in Chief Michael Vizard, Epicentric's co-founders Ed Anuff, executive vice president and chief strategy officer, and Oliver Muoto, vice president of market development, talk about the forces shaping the next generation of corporate portals.

InfoWorld: How has this market changed over the years?

Anuff: The portal space has grown up. It's had a number of large entrants into it by way of product line extension from [companies] like IBM, BEA, SAP, and CA. Meanwhile, the pure-player, independent portal space [has] really consolidated down to two major players, those being Plumtree and Epicentric. I would say that we now have to work a lot harder for our money, but I would say in terms of market share and in terms of new customer acquisition that we're doing very well. We're quite pleased with the way things are going for the company.

InfoWorld: How do you fend off those sizable competitors?

Anuff: The challenge for each vendor is to what extent can they convert where they do have a footprint in other related technologies into being a portal footprint? IBM is clearly the strongest at that. SAP has had some traction. BEA has not had much success in converting their application server footprint into a portal footprint. There are a lot of vendors that are talking about having a portal solution. You can go and talk to PeopleSoft, you can go talk to CA, you can talk to BroadVision. A lot of people have portals on their price lists, but when you get out there and really start kicking the tires on who has referenceable customers that have live deployment on their portals, and you really get down to a pretty small handful [of vendors].

InfoWorld: What kind of competitive threat does Microsoft pose in this space?

Anuff: We still see that within most of the large customers they're working on a Unix infrastructure and portals are viewed as part of an enterprise infrastructure. Thus far, we haven't seen [Microsoft] as being a major threat to what we're doing. I think that in the future we will see them as a more serious player in the small/midsize enterprise space, and certainly they will continue to play strongly in the departmental level. I think that their plans to get more serious about the portal space will have more impact on the Windows-only vendors like Plumtree.

Muoto: There's a big difference between a departmental environment and an enterprise environment. In the departmental environment, you may have one or two [Windows] NT machines and it's fairly easy to get things on those machines. An enterprise environment is a lot more complex, as I'm sure you understand. You have situations where you have clustered Web servers, you have multiple technologies that people are trying to put together. That's one area where we really shine. We support all the major databases; we support all the major Web application servers and all the major components that are best of breed.

InfoWorld: How has the downturn in the economy affected the corporate portal market?