ZapThink analyst Ronald Schmelzer also said the move further solidifies BEA’s promise that it would get out from underneath the mantle of Java it has rested under for years as its bread-and-buttter, to a more open, service-oriented approach.

“To be treated a first-class IT provider they must continue to add to their suite of products, building up a platform by virtue of being ‘feature complete,’” Schmelzer said. “There are very few companies that can fill the role of consolidator in the IT industry, and it’s clear that’s the direction BEA is heading.”

Schmelzer and Governor agree that well-defined portals are going to be a crucial part of service-oriented architecture (SOA) portfolios, which provide frameworks for Web services (define) to be shared across systems with disparate technologies.

Schmelzer said the evolution to an SOA means that it was only a matter of time before the portal market consolidated with the rest of the integration and service-oriented stack. In a service-oriented world, the role of the portal changes, he explained.

“In an SOA context, a portal is simply a Web-based interface to a composite application that is defined and managed somewhere else – usually in the composite application framework, enterprise service bus (define), SOA Fabric, Service network, or whatever you want to call it, but definitely not in the portal,” Schmelzer said.

Schmelzer said that as companies seek to use their composite applications for mobile applications, rich clients, back-end processes, embedded processes, and Web services, they will look for platforms that loosely couple the interface from the implementation. As such, it is hard to see a future for independent portal companies in the next few years.

“The Plumtree acquisition marks the end of one era – the e-business, Web-based build-out that spawned hundreds of independent software companies – and the beginning of another – the service-oriented, loosely coupled, architecture to solve integration problems era that favors the consolidator of IT over the niche vendor,” Schmelzer concluded.

Read more at: InternetNews