June 14, 2005

Plumtree Software, one of the few pure-plays left in a B2B portal marketplace, lives in a rapidly-changing world. In 2005, many of the big application developers and/or infrastructure integrators (think IBM, SAP, Microsoft, Oracle, BEA and Grand Portals for starters) have a serious emphasis on B2B portals, prompting the question of how Plumtree will ever survive in this competitive market.

"The emphasis absolutely has switched," says Andrew Dunning, director of product marketing, Plumtree. "We switched over to a Web services integration framework in 1999 and have been focused on broader-scale integration for some time."

But, in itself, that's table stakes. As Dunning points out, customers are driving the market. "A large number of our customers are now talking about the portal as an application integration framework, and we're a lightweight cross-platform integration layer."

Plumtree is in search of other differentiators, and the company's strategy demonstrates a willingness to mix it up with the big boys on their own turf. "We do sell collaboration, content publishing, business process management [BPM], and analytics technology," points out Dunning. "We are working on packaged composite apps for certain target industries. We're managing processes, managing collaboration."

Plumtree Software is taking advantage of what it knows about how applications get used within portals to build its own. As an internal Plumtree report puts it, "These composite applications typically involve collaboration and out-of-band processes combining elements of multiple traditional applications."

Composite applications are technologically young, meaning that Plumtree doesn't have to play catch-up here. And the company continues to gamble that its large portal competitors will never offer the breadth of integration that a smaller, focused portal provider can.

"History has proven time and again that behemoth companies absolutely refuse to support competing standards," Plumtree CEO John Kunze once told Line56, and Dunning follows up the message. "We're all about integration," Dunning concludes. "Other products are not open platforms, and have potential restrictions."

Source: Line 56