Plumtree Software Monday unveiled the fourth version of its corporate portal
with a special bonus — a new, patent-pending Massively Parallel Portal
Engine that processes requests for information from a wide variety of
computers in parallel.
The result is that customers will benefit from added scalability and
performance. Plumtree Corporate Portal 4.0 powers a network of more than 100
customers, 25 technology alliance members and 50 systems integrators to
share information and services between portals and with other platforms and
devices.
The Massively Parallel portal integrates these resources as Plumtree Portal
Gadgets™, distributed portal components that embed key information and
services from enterprise applications and Internet sites. Designed to
support global deployments with hundreds of thousands of users requesting
information and services from thousands of sources, the Massively Parallel
Portal Engine integrates gadgets operating on separate computers, which
simultaneously prepare information or services to embed in each user’s
portal page.
This approach is highly scalable because it divides the preparation of a
potentially large number of services among a large number of
computers. How does this work? If you take a gadget for listing e-mail
messages that takes one second to prepare, an inventory report gadget that
takes one second to prepare and an industry news gadget that takes one
second to prepare, the Massively Parallel Portal Engine assembles the page
in approximately one second, instead of three.
Delphi Group Research Director Hadley Reynolds told InternetNews.com Monday
that the industry will continue to see all of the leading portal software
firms come up with solutions to reach more users more quickly.
“Firms trying to host all portal servers within syndication is definitely
coming to the fore among Epicentric and a number of others,” Reynolds. “The
idea of providing a peer-to-peer processing support so that you’re pushing
portal services out to external resources is growing increasingly popular
with companies.”
“Improvements in portal frameworks, architecture, and deployment such as
this enable the portal to be more than just a ‘pretty face,’ providing
contextually relevant content and application services on an enterprise
basis,” said David Yockelson, senior vice president & director, Meta Group.
Because the Massively Parallel Portal Engine communicates with gadgets via
the HTTP standard, gadgets can be developed in a
wide variety of programming environments, including ASP, PERL and J2EE, on a
range of application servers, including Microsoft IIS, IBM WebSphere and
Allaire ColdFusion, and on various platforms, including Windows 2000, UNIX
and Linux.
Plumtree seems to be taking aim at industry leaders such as Epicentric Inc.
with Monday’s announcement and the firm’s strategic partners, including
ScreamingMedia, Microsoft, MicroStrategy and IBM.
The Plumtree Corporate Portal is generally available today and is licensed
on a per-user basis.
