Intelligent Enterprise

Assimilation Is Nigh

Enterprise execs see the future of portals, and we’re all caught in their Web

When the breakneck pace of the interconnected world gets to you, you might fantasize about a simpler time, or briefly entertain the thought of joining the Luddites. But when Tom Koulopoulos feels like he doesn’t have enough time for his personal life, he looks hopefully toward more interconnection facilitated by new technology and its applications — or so he claimed at the Delphi Corporate Portal Conference Executive Retreat in December.

Koulopoulos, president of The Delphi Group, and three high-profile guests presented their visions of the portal-enabled enterprise at the Claremont Hotel (Oakland, Calif.) before a group of a few hundred executives responsible for portal implementation at companies such as Lucent and Reebok. Dubious claims that people can “create time” aside, Koulopoulos made a good case for the need to “re-intermediate.” That is, that organizations should operate in a distributed model in which an automated broker governs interactions among objects.

Personal productivity portals will, in his vision, have a calendar interface. The user will drag and drop object icons into a time slot, spawning automatic processes with other objects in the networked system. The automated system will respond to every user request in what he called “crisis mode,” taking an inventory of all resources and assigning tasks as appropriate. Maybe HAL would have modeled the future better by saying, “Dave, you’re stressing me out.”

Because we find ourselves dealing with ever-increasing levels of complexity, we’re forced to find ways to be ever-more efficient in order to accomplish tasks as quickly as the world demands — in order, frankly, to be a contender in the battle for survival. An interconnected business architecture enabled by a knowledge cloud through which users have an individually relevant view is what Koulopoulos thinks will help us get along in this world.

Koulopoulos estimates his object-based, calendar-based vision will be realized in five to 10 years. He says an East Coast business school is already building this sort of portal with SAP. He also cites aggregator technology from eContent, time navigation software from Content Integrity, and something from Aerial Systems that tags people like wildlife.

eContent can map databases through Web sites without the sites’ permission. An aggregator can create a single site through which all indexed sites can be searched — a hyperportal, or as Koulopoulos called it with a little self-effacing humor, a “vortal” (vertical portal). According to Steve Nathan, VP of portal solutions, Sun/Netscape Alliance, Sun Microsystems — another of the retreat’s speakers — Brittanica.com exemplifies this model. It leads users to all kinds of external resources, including vendors selling things that match the user’s interest. The portal is designed to capture revenue not from ads or direct sales, but from affiliate selling — “coopetition” incarnate.

Koulopoulos’ explanation of the applications for time navigation software, such as that from Content Integrity, left a lot to the imagination, but with it he invoked another analogy: DNA. The currently useful portions of our DNA are activated, while most of the vestiges of our origins lie dormant, doing nothing more than presenting a record of where we came from. The lesson here is that learning to forget is as much a part of survival as learning new information. Time navigation software, which seems contrary to the idea of forgetting, preserves a snapshot at specified intervals of specified Web sites.

Like the GPS-enabled wireless phones that are more common in Europe than in the U.S. and can tailor ads according to the user’s location, Aerial Systems’ wearable units track employee location and availability. W. W. Grainger is using it to more efficiently route support calls among customer service reps. As one conference-attending exec’s mortified concern about wearing it in the bathroom suggested, people might resist such a device. But Koulopoulos thinks people will adapt despite their fears, in order to participate in community — the source of human survival — more efficiently.

Another of the day’s presenters, unpretentious and uncannily visionary Doug Englebart, currently of the Bootstrap Institute, also envisions a well-connected, possibly worldwide knowledge cloud representing our “collective IQ” and encompassing all smaller “knowledge clouds.” His visual aid, showing objects fully interconnected by lines pulsating with light, resembled a disembodied, living brain. Because this future he envisions belongs to a different paradigm than to the one which humanity is accustomed, and because our minds are controlled by our paradigm, many people won’t recognize the opportunities or risks inherent in the new world order, Englebart says.

Koulopoulos delivered his presentation with the enthusiasm of an evangelist, and perhaps Englebart considers this fully interconnected future an organic evolution. But while listening, I couldn’t help thinking: Resistance is futile; you will be assimilated. — Jeanette Burriesci

New Address For Visual Café

BEA is crafting a new development strategy out of whole cloth

Just a few months ago, enterprise middleware company BEA Systems Inc. was lacking any kind of development tools strategy, an edge enjoyed by IBM (VisualAge-WebSphere), Oracle (JBuilder-Oracle Application Server), and Sun Microsystems (Forté-NetBeans-NetDynamics). Two well-considered December announcements now appear to have eliminated their advantage, at least on paper.

Soon after acquiring packaged Enterprise JavaBean (EJB) company The Theory Center in that month, BEA announced that it will form an independent e-commerce development tools company in cooperation with Warburg Pincus Ventures (which funds BEA and is directed by former Sun Microsystems Java chief Alan Baratz). To jumpstart that effort, Warburg Pincus signed an agreement with Symantec Corp.’s Internet tools unit to purchase its “major” assets, including the Visual Café product line. (Symantec had announced last June that it intended to sell off its Visual Café business.) Although BEA intends to influence the development of future versions of Visual Café, company executives reportedly claim they will preserve that product’s open architecture.

BEA is now in a good position to promote demand for its WebLogic application server (recently upgraded to version 5.0). It can now market prebuilt, e-commerce EJB components directly (which came over in the Theory Center deal) as well as Java-development tools through the new “independent” company. That’s good news, because IBM and Sun-iPlanet will soon be introducing improved versions of their own application servers. — Justin Kestelyn

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