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.

Much to every one’s surprise, the Wave came out with nobody listed as a Leader.  Adobe, hybris (SAP), IBM and Sitecore came out as the Strong Performers followed by many others in the Contender category. Nobody was listed as a Risky Bet.

So what gives?  Really no Leaders?  Dom Nicastro wrote a story last week about this development: Forrester Wave: No Leaders in Digital Experience Delivery.

Forrester considers a Digital Experience Platform a full end-to-end delivery platform and most vendors fell short in the completeness of their offerings.  Each vendor seemed to shine in one or more areas, but nobody stood out as having all the components needed to be a Digital Experience Leader.

For me, part of the issue stems from how Forrester defined the market.  hybris from SAP is strong in Commerce, while Adobe and Sitecore are more known for their Web Content and Marketing capabilities.  So the companies included in the wave are really all over the map, in my opinion.

Is it fair to compare commerce systems with WCM systems?  Yes and no.  If you need commerce in your digital experience, then you want to know who has commerce capabilities.  If commerce isn’t important, then no and the analysis gets skewed.

There is a lot of interesting information in the Forrester report, so I encourage you to read it yourself.

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.

WebSphere Portal Active Site Analytics (ASA) framework is used to integrate third party analytics tools which  analyze web site visitor demographics and interaction patterns. ASA is built-in to WebSphere Portal, making it easy for you to integrate one of the many analytic tools into the overall experience.

Portal does not provide the analytics engine – that is provided by systems such as CoreMetrics, WebTrends, Unica and Adobe SiteCatalyst.  Portal ships with tag aggregators for CoreMetrics and Unica.  It also includes a generic aggregator that can be updated easily for other vendors.  These aggregators pull the analytic data from the page and sends it to one of the analytic systems.  You can add your own tags to a page to provide even more insights into the user behavior.

The analytics systems are used to generate reports and analysis that marketers and business users can review.  To make it very easy to view the analytics reports and charts, Portal provides a mechanism to view those reports directly on the page and in context of the various items on the page.  So you can go to a specific content area on the page and directly view the analytics report/chart for that content. This is shown in the picture below.

Thomas showed several IBM Digital Marketing Optimization solution examples and also covered how to use ASA to:

• integrate third party web analytics aggregator scripts to web portal and content pages
• collect real-time data for analysis
• out-of-box reporting
• campaign management options

New in WebSphere Portal 8 are even better inline marketing overlays, which provide business and marketing people direct, real-time views of sub-page level data, including portlets, and content items.  These overlays make it easy to see user behavior for analysis and then use this information to drive results.

The important point for us is that site analytics is no longer just reports on how many people hit our site and what pages were viewed most.  Active Site Analytics has now evolved into accessing real-time insights into the usage patterns of your Web Experience platform.  Once you capture usage data you can then optimize delivery of your marketing messages to your audiences through multiple channels,  enhanced by high capability campaign management systems, such as the IBM Marketing Center.  

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.

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.

• Organizations are demanding better user experiences in their portals.
• They see consumerization driving other products and want it for their portals.
• Mobile devices and the need for context-awareness are being demanded by users

What about cloud-based portals – is that in our future?  It certainly is!   Many vendors are starting to offer cloud-based portal systems. But beware!  The very nature of the portal is that it typically connects to a whole bunch of other systems in your organization behind your firewall.  So for a cloud-based portal to be effective, you will need to open up your internal systems to the cloud vendor and have some serious networking pipes. On the other hand, a cloud-based portal would be ideal to integrate your other cloud-based applications.

2015 is still a long way away, so what is happening between now and that future?  Here are the seven things that Gartner sees trending in the portal market over the next few years.

• Analytics need to be implemented to help gauge the effectiveness of the portal.  There has been a recent flurry of acquisitions in the Web Analytics market by traditional and newer portal vendors
• Portal-less Portals – there are several vendors beginning to offer portal type systems without claiming to be true portals.  Backbase is considered one of those vendors.  Adobe’s CQ5 could also qualify.
• Portal ubiquity – portals will become more ubiquitous as unbind their services
• Exploit context across more user attributes (aka enhanced personalization)
• Widgets are becoming more important and portlets less-so
• Mobile is becoming a key first consideration
• The User Experience Platform begins to emerge as a set of cohesive, pre-integrated, highly user interactive services rather than a bunch of products loosely coupled together.

Finally, in terms of vendors, we have basically three major portal vendors today:  IBM, Oracle, and Microsoft.  Close behind are our open source friends Liferay and JBoss. As the market begins to move toward this UXP concept, we are going to see lots of other vendors emerge with UXP offerings.  Firms from the content management space are beginning to move toward UXP, as are firms in the Social Software, Mashups, Portal-less Portals and other Markets.

Here are some vendors to keep your eye on over the next few years:

IBM, Oracle, Microsoft, Liferay, Redhat JBoss, Backbase, Adobe, Cisco, Google, Apple, United Planet, JackBe, NetVibes, Pageflakes, Fatwire, Extron, Automony, Drupal, DotNetNuke, Plone, Jive, Atlassian, Telligent, SocialText.