On October 28, 2011, Gartner updated their Magic Quadrant for Horizontal Portals. While not much has changed from 2010 in the leader’s
quadrant, there are a few new names on the chart in the other quadrants. In the pictures here you can see the 2010 version compared to 2011.
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.
Gartner Magic Quadrant for Horizontal Portals 2011
by Mark Polly on October 31st, 2011 | ~ minute read
