Gartner Magic Quadrant Horizontal Portals 2014

The leaders for 2014 are still the same leaders as in 2013 and 2012. For the past few years IBM, Microsoft and Oracle have been clustered near each other in the Leader’s quadrant, with Liferay and SAP barely making it into that coveted quadrant.  You can see my post about the 2013 version here: Gartner MQ Horizontal Portals 2013.

It’s clear that Gartner is seeing both IBM and Liferay as leading competitors. Here is Gartner’s take on IBM: “IBM’s long heritage of leadership in the enterprise portal market has brought it the broadest feature set in the industry. IBM has a long list of marquee customers across vertical industries, and it has demonstrated support for nearly every type of B2E, business-to-consumer (B2C) and B2B portal initiative.”

Gartner definitely likes what Liferay as accomplished in the past few years. “Even in the face of increasingly large, complex deployments, Liferay continues to build up a pool of satisfied customers. Liferay Portal has often succeeded where portal initiatives using other products were bogged down in cost and complexity.”

We also see several other notable shifts. First Microsoft has moved backward in the vision axis and SAP is moving higher on the vision axis. According to Gartner, Microsoft is being hurt by uncertainty around the future of SharePoint and Office365. Microsoft is definitely making a push to Office365 and many companies want to stay on-premise. Gartner says, “The future of on-premises SharePoint Server is in question.”

SAP has traditionally been viewed as a portal for SAP only.  However SAP has made a lot of investments in enabling better user experiences and can now be seen as a more broadly-based portal by companies.

Another shift in this year’s Magic Quadrant is the inclusion of Sitecore for the first time.  Sitecore is listed as a challenger along with OpenText. Gartner says, “Sitecore appeals most directly to organizations seeking WCM capability for customer-facing Web initiatives, but its offerings are increasingly considered for portals of supporting various business processes and audiences.”

Another traditional Web Content Management product, Ektron, has also made the list for the first time in the Niche Players quadrant.  Ektron is another .net-based application, like Sitecore.  It has traditionally been positioned for customer-facing and marketing sites, but Gartner is starting to see some companies use it for intranets as well.

A final shift I noticed is that Covisint has moved down the execute scale. Covisint went public in 2013 and has suffered some pains as a result of being a publicly traded company.  You can read the Gartner report for more details about Covisint.

Overall, this is interesting information from Gartner and definitely a changing landscape in the Horizontal Portal market.

In the leader quadrant, Liferay has jumped ahead of SAP on the ability to execute scale, but the big three – IBM, Microsoft and Oracle – seem to be the same.

In the visionary quadrant, salesforce.com and Adobe are poised to bust into the leader quadrant, but haven’t been able to make the jump.

Like the other quadrants, there isn’t much movement amongst the other vendors.  Either they are all getting better at the same time or nobody is making significant improvements in Gartner’s eyes.

Customer experience, digital experience, customer engagement, and marketing integration have all been a focus of many of these vendors in the last couple of years.

IBM has been investing heavily in making WebSphere Portal a key component of its customer and digital experience strategy.

Likewise, Adobe and Oracle have been positioning their portal products as the foundation for customer experience suites.

Microsoft, on the other hand, has been focusing SharePoint more and more on the intranet experience.  While they do tout some of SharePoint’s external digital experience capabilities, Microsoft seems intent on excelling in the employee experience.

Salesforce’s push into the portal space seems pretty solid with a combination of Force.com and Chatter.  Many people still can’t make the leap from Salesforce being a CRM system to Salesforce being a horizontal portal, but it has lots of capabilities just waiting to be exploited.

I think I’d like to see added to the list more Web Content Management vendors who are offering portal and portal-like capabilities.  Sitecore comes to mind as a strong WCM vendor who could compete with many of these portal solutions.

So I came across this link in Google:  TWITTER BOOTSTRAP FOR ADOBE CQ5.5.  I had no idea what a Twitter Bootstrap was, so off to the research mission!

Twitter Bootstrap is described by the developers as “Simple and flexible HTML, CSS, and Javascript for popular user interface components and interactions.”  That sounded interesting, so I dug further.  Bootstrap is based on HTML5, CSS3, a 12-column grid, some jQuery plug-ins to create a framework for building a fully responsive, run on any browser website.  What really caught my eye was that Bootstrap was built by and for nerds.

Bootstrap sounded pretty interesting, so I continued my research mission.  Next I found out that Bootstrap was the most watched project on GitHub back in March.  It is still generating lots of interest.  Its also Open Source, so anybody can participate in building out Bootstrap.  If you want to see samples of sites built using Bootstrap, you can see some on Tumblr or go to the Bootstrap page.

Back to Adobe CQ 5.5. So what does Bootstrap do for Adobe CQ 5.5?  Well officially nothing.  Adobe is not building Bootstrap sites with CQ 5.5.  But, a company called Headwire has built an integration for CQ .5.5 to use Bootstrap for the page framework.  So using the Bootstrap framework and CQ 5.5, you can easily build sites that use responsive design techniques, are instantly browser compatible, and can take advantage of jQuery, slideshows, tabs, button bars, etc.  Headwire also includes a drag and drop editor to create templates based on Bootstrap.  By creating templates you can allow your authors to fill in the templates without having to understand all that HTML and responsive stuff.

Yes, you can build these features into CQ 5.5 yourself, but why?  It seems to me that Bootstrap is a great standalone product, but when combined with Adobe CQ 5.5, you have an even better experience.

• Insight for analyzing large volumes of data in real-time
• Scene7 for converting rich media to dynamic content optimized across channels
• Search&Promote for targeted site search and surfacing relevant product and content matches
• SiteCatalyst for actionable online analytics
• Test&Target for website optimization and personalization

CQ5.5 also introduces new e-commerce capabilities using an open framework and partnership with hybris.

Four big and important new capabilities for Adobe CQ5.5 are, according to Adobe’s press release:

• Client Context—Deliver contextualized content and consistent brand experiences as customers move from channel-to-channel and device-to-device. Harnessing rich profile, segmentation and analytics data from the Adobe Digital Marketing Suite, Client Context empowers digital marketers to create, preview and optimize the personalized experience of target customer audiences.
• Mobile App Development—Empower marketing to rapidly create HTML5-based mobile apps through new integration with PhoneGap, Adobe’s standards-based framework for building cross-platform apps. Intuitive, drag-and-drop functionality takes full advantage of device features, such as the accelerometer, camera and GPS.
• DAM—Enable collaboration on rich media assets, including video, beyond the borders of the organization. Marketers can easily find, share, add comments to, and revise and publish assets regardless of format, speeding time to market on digital campaigns. Now includes integration with Adobe Creative Suite® tools, as well as Adobe Creative Cloud, which is expected in the first half of 2012.
• Cloud Manager (beta)—Ensure optimal performance during peak customer demand by eliminating bottlenecks and accelerating time-to-market on new campaigns. New cloud service enables marketers to take control of fluctuating peak customer traffic while minimizing turnaround time of key online initiatives.

This new version is a great improvement over the already outstanding CQ5 platform.  I think the Client Context features are extremely exciting as it brings the power of personalizing a web site to the non-technical user in a tremendous way.

I’m also excited about the new integrations in the Digital Asset Management tools.  This should make collaboration between the creative people and the web managers even more seamless.

Gartner sees many vendors, such as IBM, Microsoft, and Oracle expanding more and more into the Suite side of the market.  There are also emerging vendors in Suite side, including Adobe and Cisco.  On the lean side, we see vendors such as Liferay, Backbase, Drupal and DotNetNuke.

One of the key points I got out of Gene’s talk is to understand the ethos, or character, of the various vendor products.  Gene offers the following ethos for each vendor.

• Vendor -> Ethos
• Adobe -> Customer
• Cisco -> Collaboration
• IBM -> Customer; Employee
• Oracle -> Business Apps/Process
• MS -> Collaboration
• SAP -> Business Apps/Process

The ethos doesn’t mean that a vendor can’t play in another space, but it may be more challenging.

Gene offers the follow strategies to address UXP in the future:

• Take inventory of portal and portal-like technologies and efforts in your enterprise
• Establish governance early, including processes, teams and executive sponsorship
• Improve design processes as precursor to UXP adoption
• Gather Feedback from stakeholders
• Capitalize on widget and gadget integration via RESTful approaches
• Plan for an onslaught of mobile requirements
• Verify Alignment with Portal Vendor strategies
• Devise a framework and establish standards to address ongoing portal and UXP initiatives.
• Look at new sourcing strategies: buy  vs build vs hosting vs cloud

I asked about how Web Content Management vendors play in the UXP arena.  Gene responded that Personalization is really at the heart of a UXP.  Personalization is something portals do very well.  If you have a content management system that also does a good job of personalization, then that could be the basis of an excellent UXP platform.  See Adobe for an excellent example.  He thinks, and I agree, that we will see Web Content Management vendors becoming players in the UXP market.

First, Adobe purchased PhoneGap late in 2011 and has incorporated that tool into CQ5.5.  While in the past you could target CQ5 for multiple devices, with the inclusion of PhoneGap, CQ5.5 will take mobile to new heights.  In the demo, Adobe showed how easy it is to drop a camera widget on the mobile page and then preview the exact functionality via the device’s emulator.  So as you are building the mobile site, you can instantly see how each device will exactly render the page.

A second really nice feature is the Client Context view of your site.  Here you can open the site with a context viewer to see how the pages will look to various audiences.  In the context viewer, you can adjust user attributes to see how the page reacts.  You can click on a location in a map and the page will display based on that locale.  You can click on different devices and see how your page looks in that context.  This provides a great way to experiment visually with personalization rules.

Adobe is now including translations of your page into multiple languages.  For example, you can create a page in English, then click on the icon for French and have the page translated directly.  Translations can be configured to use Google Translation as the engine or you can integrate others.

One final new feature I like is the inclusion of Adobe Bridge.  This allows editors to seamlessly manage digital assets in CQ5.5 and keep them in-sync with other media efforts.  So from CQ5.5 you can open an image from the library, make changes to it through Photoshop and save the changes.  Or somebody on your creative team can make changes to an image in the digital asset library. Those changes immediately appear in CQ5.5 and then can be workflowed prior to publishing to the site.  Likewise, content and images used to generate brochures from inDesign can be reused in CQ5.5 directly.   The goal is to reduce the pain often associated with trying to sync the creative department with the web management team.

It will be exciting to see what else is coming in Adobe CQ5.5.

It is true that overall CQ5 has lots of traditional portal features.  However, unlike many other WCM systems, CQ5 has gone the extra step to include a portal server within its stack so you can run real portlets in the system.  So CQ5 can play dual roles of traditional content management and portal, just like traditional portal vendors IBM, Liferay, and SharePoint.

So the question is: can CQ5 offer the same level of portal capabilities as these other vendors?  From a pure portal point of view, I don’t think CQ5 is quite at the level of the major portal vendors.  I refer to CQ5 as more portal-lite because it does offer the ability to run standard portlets, but it lacks many of the features that the other systems provide.  Here is a small list of additional services that IBM’s portal offers that are not in CQ5:

• Credential Vault – when integrating with external sites, you sometimes need to store each user’s ID and password to pass along.  IBM provides a very secure implementation of a credential vault out of the box.
• Personalization engine access from within a portlet.  CQ5 offers personalization of content, but what if you have a custom portlet that needs to pull in personalized content.  IBM offers this service so portlets can define a content spot on the output of a portlet and that spot runs the rules engine to get personalized content.
• JSF or Struts frameworks.  Both frameworks are included in the IBM tooling for Portlets and are available in the server runtimes.  For CQ5 you will have to implement these frameworks yourself.
• Interportlet communications.  CQ5 runs JSR 286 portlets which now offer the ability to communicate with each other through portlet events.  But if you have older JSR 168 portlets that can’t do events, you have to come up with your own portlet communication system.  IBM has provided a strong portlet wiring service for a long time.
• Virtual portals in the IBM Portal provide the ability to distribute administration of portals without having to purchase separate hardware and software.  This feature allows for addressing multiple user directories when you want to keep your suppliers separate from your customers.

If you don’t plan to use these extra features, then Adobe’s CQ5 product may fit your portal needs just fine.  If these features are important, then you need to evaluate whether CQ5 should be your sole portal platform.

We often see the scenario where you have a content-heavy site for your public web presence, but you have an application-heavy secure site for customer self service.  In this case, its perfectly feasible to combine CQ5 for its great content management and digital marketing platform with a more traditional portal platform for the heavy application lifting.

For this scenario, content is managed in CQ5 for both marketing and secure sites.  Your application-heavy portal, say IBM Portal, can use the out of the box CQ5 content portlet to deliver content to the secure site.

Don’t get me wrong, I like what Adobe CQ5 offers from a WCM and Portal perspective. Many of our clients love it.  But as we see so many vendors trying to blur the lines between the technologies to offer a complete solution, I just see that the evolution is still under way.

Microsoft, IBM and Oracle continue to be the top three leaders in Gartners research.  This hasn’t changed for several years now.

Liferay and SAP continue to be designated leaders in this space, although it appears that SAP is falling behind in it vision.

In the visionaries quadrant, new comers include Backbase, salesforce.com and OpenText.

Backbase was formerly considered a niche player as it has been used primarily in financial services companies.  Now it looks like Backbase is beginning to broaden both its portal capabilities as well as its market.

salesforce.com is a newcomer to the horizontal portal Magic Quadrant.  Gartner sees its strengths as already having good connections to other enterprise applications, good adoption by users, and its cloud expertise.  Cautions from Gartner include lack of marketing of salesforce.com as a horizontal portal and licensing costs.  Gartner recommends you ask for their high-volume pricing!

OpenText was previously in the Challenger quadrant.  With the move to the visionary quadrant, Gartner views them as less capable of executing but having an improved portal vision.  Indeed, Gartner says that OpenText customers say the products functionality and support have lagged behind the leaders.  OpenText comes from the former Vignette Portal and Epicentric products, so it does have a good pedigree.

In the Challenger’s quadrant is RedHat (JBoss) open source portal.  This is been a challenger for sometime, but has not been able to break through iton the leader category as Liferay has done.  JBoss portal has been popular in large enterprises who can afford to devote time to developing the platform.  JBoss still lacks a clear vision on whether it wants to be a leader in the portal space.

Finally, the Niche players include several new names and one old name.  New entries here include Drupal, DotNetNuke and edge IPK.  Drupal and DotNetNuke come from the Web Content Management space, but we are starting to see the emergence of WCM products as viable portal platforms.  Both products lack a comprehensive portal vision, but if they want to expand into horizontal portals, they have a chance to succeed.  I’m kind of surprised to not see Adobe CQ5 included alongside these other WCM vendors, as they have portal capabilities in that product too.

edge IPK has been traditionally in the mashup and RIA space.  But Gartner considers their EdgeConnect product to be a lean portal that emphasizes multichannel presentation.  Edge IPK is still a very small vendor, but Gartner thinks they are headed toward competing in the User Experience space.

Finally, Tibco has fallen from Visionary to Niche in the Magic Quadrant.  PortalBuilder is Tibco’s product and has not garnered much attention in the market.  If your company relies on Tibco’s outstanding SOA and integration products, you might look at PortalBuilder as a front end for that integration.

In addition, while the JSR 286 spec has been out since 2008, it took the Portal vendors some time to update their Portal Servers to support the new standard.  Now all the major vendors support JSR 286 on their Portal server.  Even many content management systems are supporting JSR 286 portlets on their systems.

Also known as Portlet 2.0, JSR 286 builds upon the first portlet standard, JSR 168, so it has all the features of the first standard plus more:

• Event handling
• Shared parameters
• Resource addressing
• Alignment with WSRP 2.0

If you want a really in depth discussion of these new features, take a look at this article on developerWorks: What’s new in the Java Portlet Specification V2.0 (JSR 286)?  It’s been three years since the JSR 286 spec came out, so its hardly new.

So when should you code to JSR 286 or when should you code to JSR 168?  Here are my thoughts:

• If you are using the latest version of a mainstream portal, code to JSR 286.  Liferay 6, WebSphere Portal 7, Oracle WebCenter 11.1.1.14, JBoss, Adobe CQ5, OpenText, Apache all support JSR 286.
• If you aren’t sure what spec your portal server supports, code to JSR 168.  If you have older versions of Liferay (prior to V5), WebSphere Portal (prior to V6), Oracle WebCenter (prior to v11), you don’t have a choice – JSR 168 is the only supported spec.
• Your development environment may dictate whether you use JSR 286 or not.  In IBM’s Rational Developer, for example, it can’t create a JSR 286 portlet using Struts.  You can build a JSR 168 portlet using Struts, though.

So my bottom line is this: code to the JSR 286 standard when you can and only use JSR 168 when forced to.

Well, two products are trying to help with build once, deploy anywhere: Adobe Flash Builder and IBM Web Experience Factory.  These tools are targeted toward different kinds of developers, but they both have features that ‘easily’ target multiple devices.

Pick iOS in Flash Builder 4

Adobe Flash Builder:  I understand that it is not widely known that Flash Builder will let you build native iOS applications, in addition to Flash and Flex applications.  Holly Shinsky, @devgirlFL, explains how easy it is to use Flash Builder to create iOS applications using Flex/Air, both from Adobe.  Here is a link to the article on her blog:  Flex/AIR for iOS Development Process.

As you can see the image to the right, Apple iOS and Google Android applications can be generated right out of Flash Builder.  Of course, you can’t deploy Flash applications to the iPhone, but Flex applications work fine.

IBM Web Experience Factory:  IBM has just released Web Experience Factory Version 7.0.1.  (Web Experience Factory used to be called Portlet Factory, but since it does so much more than build portlets, IBM wisely changed its name.)    Web Experience Factory now includes Mobile and Multi-Channel support.  This allows you to build one application and deploy it to Portal, WebSphere Application Server and now mobile devices.  Here is a link to the announcement where you can get more details.

Applications built by Web Experience Factory are not native applications, but are web browser based.  Support for mobile devices includes two new, cool features though.  First, Factory uses its Profiling feature to allow you to target various devices in one code base.  By enabling the mobile UI features, your application will tailor itself to various mobile devices, including iOS and Android.  This video shows you how you can build a muli channel application using Facotry: Build multi-channel application in 13 minutes.

The second new feature in Web Experience Factory is the support for many device specific features such as Geolocation, selectable lists, phone numbers, etc.

You can access videos about Web Experience Factory here.