IBM’s WebSphere Portal team interviewed Perficient’s Mike Porter, principal of portals and director of collaboration with Perficient, at the IBM Portal Excellence Conference, October 14, 2009. They discussed Perficient’s partnership with IBM’s WebSphere solution and how portal solutions are solving communication and collaboration problems for organizations. I received the full transcript and decided to pick out some highlights for you. Below is an edited version of the interview.
Interviewer: Give me a snapshot of your company.
Porter: The customer says, I have a need. I need to put a website up. I need to have key collaboration capabilities up. They have a specific need that drives that. And we actually go through and figure out how to implement it.
These days it’s never about just the one site. It’s about everything else around it, which is one reason why we migrated very heavily towards portal, because portal is exactly that, kind of an aggregator type solution.
Interviewer: Why are customers turning to portals?
Portals: The “Swiss Army Knife” of the enterprise.
Porter: Gene Pfeiffer from Gartner uses a fantastic analogy. He calls portal the “Swiss Army Knife” of the enterprise. And it’s a great analogy, because a Swiss Army Knife has a lot of different tools, and you bring out those tools depending on what the situation is. Websphere Portal does a fantastic job for a customer service portal, for example. A partner portal does a fantastic job in things like single sign on and things like allowing them to go and hit multiple back end systems and create a very personalized experience.
Let me give you an example. When one business has 15 different kinds of partners, ranging from the small mom and pop shop, up to the very biggest of partners, to distributor type partners, to services related partners– when you go and you work with them, they have to actually personalize the experience for all of them, and a simple website’s just not going to cut it. A portal is what’s going to say, hey, we’ve got a personalization engine. It’s that kind of personalization that you can approach and say: “You’ve logged on. We know who you are. And now we’re going to treat you differently than we treat somebody else. “
Interviewer: What are the strengths that the IBM Websphere Portal brings to the mix?
Porter: Websphere Portal does a fantastic job of working on two different approaches. First and foremost, it’s the customer experience. When someone logs in, it has to look nice. It has to give them a really easy way to do whatever it is that they’re trying to do. That’s where a nice content management system comes into play, with personalization, a good search engine, for example, but none of that really works unless the underlying technology is solid. It has to know how to go back and integrate with the mainframe. It has to be up and running when my customer at midnight wants to have some sort of interaction with it. IBM is better than anyone else in that industry. It comes from, well, it really comes from their DNA.
Interviewer: What are the things that I have to understand and really focus on to make the right choices and the right implementation of a full portal solution?
Porter: Implementing a portal is first and foremost about the use experience. They actually call it UX for short. But the user experience says, the users themselves are the ones who know what they want. If you interact with them to start with, and have frequent interactions throughout the whole set of projects that you’re doing, these phases, then you’re going to have a more successful portal.
Interviewer: In your case, Perficient’s case, you’re a solid company, growing very well and recognized for your growth. You’re making hardnosed decisions out there on what’s going to grow your business. Tell me about the Websphere Portal solution and why that’s, you’re making such a choice with that.
Porter: We actually chose Websphere Portal pretty early on. When IBM first released Websphere Portal back in 2001, we took one look at it, and we said, portal is about the end user experience. Portal is about taking the data that exists in silos in the back of these businesses and pushing it out to whoever those end users may be. IBM understands how to deal with that, those data end transactions. The portal really is the end point for all of that. I mean, there’s no one better at that. We were pretty impressed with the commitment since day one.
Interviewer: What if the next guy down the hall says, “All I’m hearing from my board is, we’ve got to innovate.” How does this help me foster some innovation in this organization?
Porter: You say innovation, and you could just as easily say something like collaboration, because typically innovation these days isn’t about one person going off and doing something. It’s about many people creating something that didn’t exist before. The portal actually acts as the central point, the jumping off point for all of that collaboration. And when you say you want to innovate, you’re saying that you want people to work together in ways they’ve not been able to work together before. You’re breaking down those silos. So the portal is really a good way to start this.
Interviewer: Tell me again, in today’s world, what are the challenges that clients are facing, and how are Perficient and Websphere Portal in that mix?
Porter: In this economy, the challenge that they have is, they have to do more with less. They have customers who are having issues. They’re having their own pricing pressures. They’re having to be able to take really sometimes a strained IT department, because there’s been layoffs. And they’re still saying, I want you, even though you have less people, to do more. I want you to be able to bring up the same set of sites that you were going to.
If I had to custom code a website, it might take me– especially with what some of our customers want to do– it might take me three years. If I can put portal in front of that, and use some of the ancillary technologies, sometimes I can do it in as little as half that.
