Gartner PCC: Gartner predicts “siesmic shift” in Portal market by 2015

Is the User Experience Platform (UXP) the replacement for portal?  UXP is not an existing product or market, but Gene Phifer of Gartner expects it to come by 2015.  Gartner thinks there is a “seismic market shift” coming for portal products, mashups and content management.

So what is a User Experience Platform? Or better yet, what is the concept of a user Experience Platform?  And how are we going to get to this concept of UXP?  UXP is an integrated set of techonolgies integrated into a highly user centric interface.  At the heart of UXP is going to be portals and mashups.  Vendors will augment the UXP platform with additional services depending on each vendor’s specific view of the market.  These additional services include search, analytics, e-commerce, content, social, collaboration, content and context. Mobile applications will evolve into UXPs.

One of the main features of the UXP will be pre-wired, integrated tools.   It will come as a more fully assembled product than existing portals.  There will be some wiring to do still, but the vendors will pre-build most of the connections.

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Another major feature is the inclusion of “User Experience Design and Management” services to help companies design user experience for the platform.  These features will include tools to help build personas or role based interfaces.  They will also include tools to integrate context into the platform.

Context architecture will become important to identify and capture and process context attributes that will be used to drive the UXP.  The architecture will help deliver content within context.

Vendor Specific strategies:

• Microsoft Sharepoint – Sharepoint can be considered the poster child of UXP.  SP combined Portal, content, lightweight DM, lightweight analytics, search into a single product.
• Oracle WebCenter –  Oracle is still working on their vision of converging of all their portals into Web Center Suite.  Web Center is the Oracle entry into UXP.  Oracle plans to use Web Center as the front end to Fusion Applications.  Oracle’s will have specific feature sets targeted at Social, Customer and Composite Applications.
• IBM – Customer Experience Suite is IBM’s entry into UXP.  Right now the focus is on customers.  Underlying this is the Social Business Framework.
• Cisco – they have an emerging UXP based on an internal project that originally was built on Liferay portal.  They have bundled this into a new  Enterprise Collaboration Platform (ECP).  Quad Application Framework is the first application based on collaboration. Most of Liferay was rewritten during the development of Quad
• Abode – they have a portal called Mosaic.  Customer Experience Management (CEM) is their new platform built around Day software.  Adobe is focused on customer.
• Other Vendors:  edgeIPK – has edgeConnect platform as an emerging UXP. Liferay, Backbase, JackBe, Imatia Google,

One of the most important technologies in UXP will be HTML 5.  This will enable multichannel delivery of the UXP.  Gartner thinks that much of Flash/Silverlight/etc will move to HTML 5 in the future.