REDWOOD CITY, CALIF. - E-commerce software maker BroadVision last week continued its push into the portal market, releasing a trio of updated applications that center on providing businesses a collaborative portal framework for business-to-business, business-to-consumer and business-to-employee projects.
The company unveiled BroadVision 7, a package of portal technologies that includes content management and enhanced personalization capabilities. With the release, BroadVision is "repositioning the company around enterprise business portals," says Simon King, vice president of advanced strategy at BroadVision.
King says a survey of BroadVision customers found they were no longer satisfied with the separate e-commerce and portal applications that the company offered. In the area of e-commerce, BroadVision sold Retail Commerce, which focused on business-to-consumer efforts; Business Commerce focused on business-to-business needs; and Market Maker set up online marketplaces.
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"We've now converged those so the enterprise that's in reality doing all of those at once has a single technology to implement a business process associated with commerce and a portal to manage the segregation of users and content," King says.
Toshiba America Information Systems, in Irvine, Calif., has used BroadVision since early 2000 to support various sites, including a marketing site, a business-to-consumer site and a password-protected business-to-business site for corporate customers and channel partners. Toshiba built the sites using BroadVision's Retail Commerce, Business Commerce and InfoExchange Portal products.
Dave McDonald, vice president of Information Resources at Toshiba, says he's excited about the improved functionality in BroadVision 7 and is already licensed for One-to-One Commerce and One-to-One Portal.
"We like the merged functionality of [business to commerce] and [business to business] in one system, with custom catalogs, price books and personalized product presentation," McDonald says. "Having both [business to commerce] and [business to business] applications together in one system will greatly simplify our marketing and IT people's jobs."
BroadVision 7 includes:
The Portal and Commerce offerings are built on Java 2 Platform Enterprise Edition and can run on BroadVision's One-to-One Enterprise application platform or on J2EE application servers from BEA Systems and IBM. Later releases will include support for other application servers including Sun ONE and Oracle 9iAS, BroadVision says.
Updates to the portal product include enhanced support for Web services so that "portlets" (chunks of code that display applications within the portal view) can connect directly to Web services and integrated content management so that content can be reviewed and edited from within the portal.
The new release also provides single sign-on and Lightweight Directory Access Protocol support, and enhanced collaboration capabilities through "microsites," subsites within the portal that business users can configure and set up for specific projects and communities.
With BroadVision 7, the company is introducing a new CPU-based pricing structure. The Portal and Commerce products are scheduled to be available by the end of next month and will start at $60,000 per CPU, with a minimum of two CPUs for each application, King says. They will be available on Hewlett-Packard's HP-UX, AIX, Windows 2000 and Solaris.
Content 7.0 is slated to be available in the third quarter and will be priced at $40,000 per CPU.
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