In a call with analysts this morning, IBM introduced some new initiatives and products. First up was WebSphere Portal NOW, which is a quick-start program that can get an enterprise portal program up-and-running in roughly two weeks. It includes basic platform software (or middleware) that includes a good deal of re-usable and extensible templates for personal and branded portals, and a set of well-defined business processes to simplify start-up.

The process of building and supporting hundreds of millions of personalized portals creates a huge business opportunity for Big Blue. The prospects are very good as the company as acceptance grows for blogging, tagging, social networks coupled and new API’s are constructed from well-established standards like XML, AJAX, PHP, REST, RSS and others. The Blue Revolution is underway.
IBM also revealed the “fast track” elements to the WebSphere Portal 6.1 portfolio. It started the year with greater attention to resources in Amazon.com’s “cloud” of Web services. But developments also encompassed enhanced rendering of WebSphere Content Management (WCM) results in the form of portlets, as well as more robust support of PHP. This month (July 2009) brings the promise of integration with Lotus Mashup, as well as enhanced resources for portal page customization. The result will be some very impressive integration of content from multiple sources (including “feeds”, blogs, social networks…) to be rendered on desktops, laptops and mobile phones.

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Tags: Recombinant Telephony, IBM, Collaboration, Portals