By Jonathan Crow

Next up in our continuing coverage of Intalio JapanCon 2008 is Bryan Cheung, the CEO of Liferay - the leading Enterprise Open Source Portal.

Within the last ten years the idea of the Enterprise Portal has matured to fulfill the promise of the original value statement.

What Is Liferay
IBM Webshphere and Oracle and BEA Portals. Really when you are looking at Enterprise Portals, there are fewer and fewer players. When Oracle purchased BEA that created a combinate of 4 portals under the same roof. What is certain is that only one of those is going to survive. If you are looking to deploy a portal today, there is a lot of risk.

Liferay has a leg up in that they are the leading Open Source vendor. They are also a competitor to Sharepoint. Liferay provides same degree of collaboration, same Sharepoint functionality but in an open way. Also, social software and collaboration is combining into one category to make knowledge workers more productive. Liferay vigorously adheres to standards.

Customers include NBA, Sesame Street (a favorite of mine) and BMW.

What Business Problems does Liferay solve?

• Unify personalization, securit, application/data access and user experience across the enterprise
• Quickly create portals, intranets, shared workspaces, web sites and apps
• Bring together SOA and Web 2.0
• Retain control of your technology and business

In the past Portals have promised more than delivered. Liferay is determined to give as much functionality out of the box to deliver on the original promise and now the technology is mature enough to make it happen. As Ismael mentioned, you are never sure which software is going to survive, and without access to the source code you can never be sure that software will live on. Open Source assures the customer that they always have access to the code to maintain.

Case Studies
HanseMerkur Insurance Group
High availability website - in moving from Web 1.0 to 2.0, we still need to ensure availability but with dynamic content.
Advertising campaigns drove customers to website in waves. Hard deadline set by business because of campaigns. Content was constantly changing. Liferay portal for content publishing with multiple authors. The site went live in 6 weeks. At peak a quarter million pages are served per hour.

Enterprise Integration portal - customer and sales data integrated. Assured online access for entire sales. Single sign on and bringing in a single user experience were key. They received a very high level of acceptance immediately after going live. Adding services quickly is now possible.

Cisco Systems
Wanted to use Liferay for developer network for social collaborative work. Diagram of community of communities, different groups for technologies and solutions. They wanted to foster innovation among partners to accelerate solutions development. They used Liferay to create stickiness and reduced dependence on internal support by providing this community. Phase 1 is building a collaboration platform, Phase 2 will add Business Processes, and Phase 3 is building community enhancement.

Now Bryan goes into demo mode. He shows how easy it was to build a replica of the Nintendo site and compartmentalize the site by creating different articles and combining them on the same page.

Other blog articles in this series:

• Intalio JapanCon 2008: Introducing BPP
• Intalio JapanCon 2008: Henry Peyret - Forrester
  
• Intalio JapanCon 2008: BAM Presentation
• Intalio JapanCon 2008: Liferay Portal
• Intalio JapanCon 2008: Intalio Server Overview

October 5th, 2008