I’m at the 2012 Liferay Symposium in San Francisco. Liferay is the company name and the name of its open source portal. Gartner rates Liferay as one of the leaders in the horizontal portal market and is the only open source product rated as a leader.
Bryan Cheung. Liferay CEO presented the opening session this morning. The theme is Open: For Business. Bryan presented what he sees as three shifts in the world:
- Everything is shifting from internal focus to customer focus
Includes participating and the experience as a key element - Old way is you were either free or communist, developed vs undeveloped
- Requires us to look at new ways of forming communities
- Mobile creates overlap between business and personal lives
- Cloud is gaining ground
Cultural shift
Geopolitical shift
Technological change
What is common between all three shifts? Openness is a critical factor in all three areas.
Bryan believes in open source, not as a way to only provide free software. Rather open source is all about the Open part. Open source is more about the community engaging in the process of solving business problems, so the idea of people contributing to the solution regardless of who they are and where they come from.
How does this affect Liferay? The role of the portal is now of being a broker between customers, employees, partners, global resources, and internal apps. Liferay sees that an enterprise portal runs the risk of being too heavy and too kludgy. Liferay has been focused on being nimble and lightweight for both enterprise and non enterprise applications.
