I figured I would post a picture before I started sweating profusely.I’m very pleased to announce that bdg has officially kicked off our very much irregular and irreverent Plumtree podcast!
Please download and listen to our first episode, which talks about the background of your host, yours truly, Chris Bucchere; gives a rundown of recent news in the Plumtree world including G6 features and an Odyssey recap; and ends with a trivia challenge.
See if you can be our first winner by answering the question at the end of the podcast. Enjoy!
With a resounding victory this morning in the Booth of Pain, bdg put the wraps on what will probably be the last Plumtree Odyssey.
We sent five people this year: me (President & CEO), Eric Bucchere (Account Manager) and Rich Weinhold (Plumtree Developer) representing the East Coast and Howie Bagley (VP Sales & Service) and Steve Markoff (Plumtree Architect) representing the West Coast. We had the opportunity to meet many of you at our booth – thank you for stopping by and introducing yourselves! In the upcoming weeks we’ll be raffling off the iPod Nano that was on display in our booth. If you asked us to follow up with you, expect to receive a follow up call or e-mail in the next 2-3 weeks.
Although the official feedback has not been tallied up yet, the talk we gave with Wind River was standing room only and I personally received lots of positive comments including one person who said that our session was the highlight of this year’s Odyssey. Another piece of feedback I got from Jack Jones of DTIC was that without our training (given in 2004), they would have gotten nowhere with their Plumtree project.
Winning the Booth of Pain competition was the icing on the cake. Despite the heat, the claustrophobic booth and numerous distractions from David Meyer (including scaling my booth, firing projectiles at me and scrawling the word “LOSER” across my booth with Silly String), I was able to compile and assemble the PTMingle application in about 25 or 30 minutes and then give a demo, which was very well received by the audience. In a humorous moment, I clicked on a del.icio.us hobby link related to “Romance Novels” and it displayed a half naked, hunky long haired dude with a cheesy smile (think Fabio). I quickly closed the window amid quite a bit of laughter from the audience.
PTMingle at this point is no more than a concept application/prototype, but expect to see the code used in the Booth of Pain competition up on the Code Share within the next few days. Plumtree data visualization in hyperbolic trees, profile integration with del.icio.us and Google maps integration are all hot topics right now and all areas of interest that bdg would like to pursue, so you should keep an eye out for more offerings from bdg that exhibit these features.
In closing, I wanted to send a resounding THANK YOU out to Yi Hong Xu of Wind River for her help with the presentation, to Mattias Cudich for plugging this blog during his Holland presentation (more on this later), to all of you who attended our presentation or the Booth of Pain, to all of you who stopped by our booth and last but certainly not least to the stellar team of bdg-ers who made this event a huge success for bdg.
On a personal note, this year’s Odyssey had a bittersweet feel for me. It was my sixth Odyssey, having attended four as a Plumtree employee, two as a bdg-er and missing just one (in 2003) and it will most likely be the last. We do, however, look forward to seeing all of you again next year at BEA World in San Francisco.
Look for more posts from me regarding the material presented at Odyssey, especially on Project Holland, which has exciting implications for future BEA/Plumtree offerings.
We’re going for a big splash this year at the final Odyssey+ADC while Plumtree is still, well, Plumtree.
Plumtree just released the onsite guide showing bdg in several places, so I figured it was time to announce our plans for this great user conference, which takes place Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday of next week.
For starters, we’re sponsoring at the bronze level, which includes a booth in the partner pavilion. At the booth, we’ll be handing out bdg mouse pads, marketing literature about PTSkinz and the PHP EDK, giving demos of PTSkinz and giving away an iPod Nano!
In addition to our booth presence, we’ll be co-presenting on Monday at 3:30 PM in the Regency 2 ballroom with Plumtree and bdg customer Wind River. The topic of our presentation is “Keeping it Simple: Best Practices in User Interface Design and Customization.”
Lastly, we’ll be competing in the Booth of Pain, a coding competition that will show attendees how to assemble a composite application in Plumtree from source code. That takes place at 10:15 AM on Wednesay in the Diplomat 3,4 & 5 ballrooms.
Please stop by our booth, pick up a free mouse pad, register to win an iPod Nano and join us for our presentation with Wind River and/or the Booth of Pain.
We look forward to seeing you at Odyssey!
Or IBM? Or Oracle?
The author of this brief article seems to think that all three companies have BEA in their sites.
Interesting . . . .
Late yesterday, Plumtree announced the release of their G6 line of products. They have made everything generally available for download for partners and customers at portal.plumtree.com.
A couple things have been renamed. The Portal has become the “Foundation,” Content Server has become “Publisher,” Authentication Web Services have become “Identity Services,” Crawler Web Services have become “Content Services,” the .NET Web Controls have had the word “Consumer” tacked on the end, and the EDK (once known as the GDK), is now contained within something called the PDK. Not sure what happened to the WSRP container, but the JSR 168 container has been updated for G6 as well.
The major difference is that the Foundation product and many of the services are now entirely Java-based or entirely C#-based. This means some interesting things, including the fact that although Plumtree is only officially supporting RedHat Linux 3 ES Update 3 right now, there’s a good chance that the Java version will run (and run well) on other versions of Linux and even on Solaris or even Solaris X86.
On Windows, the support matrix includes IIS 6.0 and SQL Server 2000 SP3a.
For the non-Microsofties, Oracle 9i and Oracle 10G (with or without RAC) are supported along with Tomcat 5.0.28, IBM WebSphere 6.0.1 and of course BEA 8.1 SP4.
If you’re just silly like that, you can also run any of those configurations on Windows, but I’d have to ask you “why?!?” if you did. 😉
Major feature differences include a re-tooled (and now web-based) object migration, enhanced subportals (now called user experiences), improved user syncrhonization, enhanced Snapshot Queries and Best Best, and improved tools for integrating existing web applications into the portal.
Everyone at bdg is excited about this release and we look forward to helping our customers upgrade to the latest and greatest, starting whenever they’re ready.
I am very pleased to announce that Steve Markoff, an outstanding software engineer with over 10 years of product development experience and a background in Plumtree and open source, has joined the bdg team.
Steve has already been working on a Java- and Plumtree-based product licensing application for one of our marquee customers, Wind River. He also led an effort at Boeing to develop reference documentation and performance testing plans for their Apache and Tomcat configurations.
Prior to joining bdg fulltime, Steve worked on mission-critical applications for Wells Fargo and built a distributed music encoding application for Netscape/AOL that handles millions of records and several terabytes of data. He also integrated web services and caching middleware using a Java and open source stack.
His first encounter with Plumtree was back in 2001 when he designed and built Plumtree’s bug tracking system from the ground up using SQL Server, JDBC, Java, XML, Tomcat and Plumtree. Given that his customer was the incredibly bright and demanding Plumtree engineering team, he had his work cut out for him and he did a stellar job. (I can speak from personal experience, because I used this system myself for several years.)
Prior to contracting at Plumtree, Steve built J2EE web applications on behalf of a startup company called Emerald Solutions that served customers in the gaming, outdoor adventure, and biotech industries. Prior to his startup experience, he spent almost five years working for IBM Global Services where he built client/server and web applications in Java.
Steve graduated cum laude from the CS Honors program at Hamilton College in 1995.
I speak for all of us at bdg when I say that I’m extremely excited to add Steve to our team. Please join me in welcoming him to bdg!
I found this post on the Butler Group Blog regarding the BEA Plumtree acquisition to be quite interesting and insightful. Check it out!
Several colleagues, coworkers, customers and other Plumtree partners have asked me for my opinion on the buyout of Plumtree by BEA Systems. I certainly have thoughts and comments about this event, but moreover I have several open questions that I want to ask Plumtree, BEA and the community of customers and partners. Of course I have my own take on the answers, but I’m curious to hear from others in the community.
First, let me say this: I feel overwhelmingly positive about the acquisition. BEA is a great company with excellent products (Weblogic, Tuxedo, JRocket) and a solid strategic vision. Most of the articles I’ve read have said that they plan to make Plumtree its own business unit and continue to support Plumtree’s 700 customers. By purchasing Plumtree, BEA has made a strong, albeit implied, statement about the portal market. You won’t read this in any of the articles out there, but it’s a statement that I’ve been making for a long time: Plumtree is clearly the best and the only pure-play horizontal portal technology out there. All of this is good news for Plumtree and for Plumtree partners like bdg.
Now, on to my questions . . . .
Will BEA continue to support Plumtree on .NET?
According to the FAQ published on BEA’s web site, the company plans to support Plumtree on all of the existing platforms and application servers on which it runs. This is a major change of direction for BEA, which has always aligned itself more with the Java/Sun/McNealy vision that the .NET/MS/Gates vision and which ties all of its products to its own application server, Weblogic.
The problem is that IT departments in major companies have their own near-religious beliefs about platforms. Some want “pure” Microsoft stacks (Windows, SQLServer, IIS, .NET/CLR), some want “pure” Java stacks (Solaris, Oracle DB, Weblogic/Websphere/Tomcat/JBoss and Java/JVM) and some even want LAMP stacks (Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP).
In order for a portal — the UI integration layer for the enterprise — to be successful in the heterogeneous IT world in which we live, it must run on all of those platforms and it must have a strategy for supporting integration with every platform. It’s clear from their product direction, including their recent decision to support Linux, that Plumtree has known this for a long time. I can’t speak for BEA, but the message I’ve been getting from them for the past several years is that you can solve all the world’s problems — or least all the world’s IT problems — with Java. As much as I like Java, I’ve never quite bought into that vision. The IT world is just too heterogeneous for that vision to approach reality.
I sincerely hope that BEA sticks to this new strategy of supporting the Microsoft stack for Plumtree. The good news is that Weblogic has always run on Windows. Running Java on Windows is fine in my book, but if you tell that to the approximately 500 Plumtree customers who run Plumtree on a Microsoft stack, they’re not going to be pleased. In fact, I think they’ll start looking for another solution, perhaps even Sharepoint.
What will happen to BEA’s Portal product?
The press releases are calling BEA’s portal product a transactional portal for the extranet and Plumtree’s a collaborative portal for the intranet. This is nothing more than an attempt to downplay the competitive nature of the two products. This spin isn’t working for me. bdg has built transactional extranets using Plumtree and I’m sure that enterprises have built collaborative intranets using the BEA Portal. In fact, BEA specifically pitches the collaborative features of their portal product as part of their marketing literature.
Obviously the companies need to make a statement saying that they’re going to support both camps in order to avoid massive customer hemorrhaging. (Look what happened to Epicentric’s customers when they were acquired by Vignette.) It’s good to hear that the near-term plan supports both portal products for the sake of the customers, but I hope to hear some more believable strategic direction from BEA and Plumtree about their clearly competitive portal offerings.
What would make sense to me would be a hybrid that includes most of Plumtree’s compelling out-of-the-box functionality — including collaboration, content management and usage tracking — and merge it with the compelling parts of BEA’s portal, such as the Portal Java Controls and the Portal Resources Designer. Development tools like these will greatly enhance Plumtree’s Java developer offerings to bring them up to speed with their Microsoft offerings (like the EDK’s .NET Web Controls). But there are some big architectural decisions to make. For example, is it better to integrate BEA’s Designer with the Plumtree EDK to help those of us building Java portlets, or should they take an IDE plug-in approach for Eclipse like Plumtree did with the .NET IDE?
The industry press is still beating up BEA for having a Java client portal designer instead of a web-based one just like they beat up Plumtree four years ago because of their Windows-based portal designer (called Content Manager). The answer is simple: BEA needs to webify their portal designer. But if they’re going to live by their new strategy of cross-platform support, anything they build will need to have a .NET equivalent.
This may be cynical, but I think telling all the developers who currently support Weblogic Portal that they’re going to have start thinking about portability to .NET is going to be a hard sell.
How will the merger affect the ship date for Plumtree G6?
Plumtree has set a ship date for G6, the next generation of their portal product. The product is currently in Beta, so we all know that we’re getting close.
The press releases and FAQ do not mention G6 or say anything about the next version of BEA’s portal. If any kind of tangible BEA Portal/Plumtree Portal integration attempts are squeezed into G6, I doubt that they will hit their ship date.
I think it would be a smart move to ship G6 as is — and there’s a good chance that it will happen, given the fact that Plumtree will be a separate business unit at BEA — and then shoot for integration in the next major product iteration, whenever that is.
I hope to hear some clear direction from the two companies on this soon because our customers’ rollout plans are directly affected by information like this.
Will this deal make BEA even more of an acquisition target for Oracle?
Everyone I know — myself included — had a feeling that Plumtree would be acquired some day. But the major questions were 1) when and 2) by whom? Quite some time ago and long before Plumtree had its Java strategy fleshed out, there were rumors of a Microsoft takeover. Then Siebel. Then Peoplesoft. But BEA? I never would have guessed.
I personally thought Oracle would be the suitor, especially after they acquired Oblix, PeopleSoft and J.D. Edwards. After extending its tentacles into almost every enterprise software market (and proving tremendously incapable of producing any decent software applications other than a database), Oracle snapped up ERP, HR and SSO/Identity Management in the blink of an eye. It seemed reasonable to me that a good portal product that could integrate with all those applications would be a clear next target. Oracle’s portal certainly doesn’t cut the mustard. In fact, they often offer it up for free only to be beaten out by Plumtree, which is, ahem, a far cry from free.
Now the next pressing question: is Oracle even more likely to acquire Plumtree now that they’re a part of BEA? Now they’d get an excellent application server and a cross-platform, industry-leading portal. You know it crossed Larry Ellison’s mind when he heard the news. Food for thought.
What will happen to the name Plumtree?
Back in late 1998, when BEA acquired WebLogic, Inc., they kept the company’s preexisting market share and mind share intact by transitioning the name of the company into the name of what has become BEA’s flagship product. Oracle has done the same with its recent acquisitions.
BEA would be wise to do the same with Plumtree. “BEA Plumtree Portal” may not have a ring to it right now — but mark my words — it is soon to become a household name in the world of enterprise software.
* * *
For all of you who asked, those are my thoughts on the merger. Sorry it took me almost a week to come up with a response to your questions, but if you recall from an earlier post, I was teaching a Plumtree training class all last week. Anyone who has taught training knows how exhausting that is, hence the delay in putting my thoughts on (virtual) paper.
As always, your comments are most welcome.
Big news: BEA plans to aquire Plumtree Software for $5.50/share or about $200 million in cash. Read the full story.