BT Secures Corporate Portal Help from Plumtree

British Telecom’s applications service provider unit teamed with Plumtree
Software Thursday to develop applications and services fronted by a
Plumtree-based corporate portal and hosted by BT Ignite.

The ASP suite, hosted by BT’s broadband and Internet Protocol business,
looks to offer customers, medium to large business and governments
personalized messaging applications, directory services and collaboration
tools.

The BT Ignite Application Services portfolio of business applications has
evolved from an intranet deployed within BT to over 90,000 employees around
the world, incorporating applications from the likes of Microsoft Corp. and
Lotus.

As with most major corporate portals, the BT intranet has saved the company
substantial sums of money by eliminating the need to print and update
paper-based directories, company information and catalogues for its
workforce. It has also improved global knowledge sharing.

The Plumtree Corporate Portal is a software application that provides an
integrated desktop environment for the BT
Ignite Application Services suite of business productivity solutions. The
corporate portal assembles information and
services from enterprise applications and the Internet into a single access
point. The Plumtree Corporate Portal can also integrate resources from
customers’ existing information technology environments.

Plumtree CEO John Kunze expounded on the cost-saving aspects of the deal,
for which terms were not made public.

“Rather than purchasing individual applications and installing them at each
site, customers can now subscribe to services via the Internet that can be
made available to everyone in the business through the Plumtree corporate
portal,” Kunze said.

As most of its partners do, Plumtree was chosen by BT for its ease of
integration and scalability. Plumtree’s Portal
Network Architecture, which allows different components of a portal
deployment to work in tandem via the Internet, was
also important for deploying the portal in a hosted environment.

For Plumtree, Thursday’s deal is the second partnership with a major company
this week as Red Herring Tuesday selected Plumtree to power its intranet.