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The power behind the portal

By Todd Sundsted, JavaWorld.com, 12/01/98

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You can sum up Sun's vision for the future direction of enterprise software in one word: portal. In a teleconference on October 21, Dr. Alan Baratz, president of Sun's Java Software Division, first espoused Sun's intentions: "[Portals] are about providing software and services that link. Today they link browsers to information. They allow all of us sitting at home or in our workplace with a PC or a desktop device and a browser to be able to connect to a sea of information."

And in the past six weeks or so, that message hasn't changed. In fact, the message has only intensified here at the Java Business Expo conference, with Sun's official "coming-out party" as a true enterprise software provider.

At the Enterprise Software event on December 9, Dr. Baratz talked about the current portals, such as Yahoo, Excite, and Netcenter, which provide services like e-mail, weather reports, consumer information, and news, but not your typical line of enterprise applications. He believes, however, that this model will change.

Dr. Baratz envisions a day in which companies provide portals -- not to the Web public at large, but to their employees, customers, suppliers, and partners. These portals won't provide the general suite of services that characterize such commercial portals as Yahoo. Instead, they'll provide targeted trade news, company information, employee benefits information, and access to Web-enabled enterprise applications. And users will have access to this information and these applications anywhere, and any time they can get their hands on a browser. Portals will become, in his words, "the core of the enterprise software computing environment."

Chances are he's right. While most portals are hand crafted, a small handful of start-ups have appeared with sights firmly fastened specifically on the enterprise portal market (rather than on the general application server market). Sun, itself, not only preaches the portal line, but is building an employee portal through which employees will be able to access company information no matter their physical location. Other companies, including Citibank Mortgage, Day-Timers, Inc. and Southern California Gas, are deploying portals as well -- all built upon Sun enterprise software.

Sun's plans are clear. It hopes to position itself firmly in the center of this market, both as an end-to-end solutions provider (with products spanning glass house to embedded devices), and as the purveyor of the preferred platform upon which the products will be built (the Java platform).

The role of application servers

Sun's acquisition of NetDynamics reveals a lot about its intended approach to the enterprise portal market. The company believes the key to the nascent market is the application server (the power behind the portal).

Application servers live on the middle tiers of n-tier application architectures. They host business logic and consolidate the information provided by back-end systems and databases into a form that has real business meaning -- hence the term "application" in application server.

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