Novell Turns Its Tools on the Enterprise Portal Market

Novell Turns Its Tools on the Enterprise Portal Market
  
Novell has entered the portal product race with the introduction of Novell Portal Services 1.5. Gartner recommends this second-generation portal offering to Novell customers looking to deploy a basic portal infrastructure.
 
  
 
  

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Event
On 21 February 2002, Novell, a networking software and service provider, announced the availability of Novell Portal Services 1.5 for helping companies build more-personalized, more-secure enterprisewide portals. Novell priced the offering at $59 per user or $49,000 per CPU.
 

  
First Take
Novell Portal Services 1.5 represents the evolution of a toolkit into the company's first true packaged portal offering. It has the basic features of what Gartner classifies as a Generation Two portal product:

Personalization
Content aggregation
Search
An application integration framework
Support for application servers
Novell Portal Services 1.5 runs on multiple platforms (Novell's NetWare, Sun Microsystems' Solaris, and Microsoft Windows 2000 and Windows NT), but because the product requires Novell Directory Services, it seems targeted at Novell customers. The offering has a competitive price, at least per seat — the per-CPU pricing ranks a little higher than the industry average. Novell offers Novell Portal Services 1.5 as part of a consulting solution called Active Information Portal (AIP), targeted at business-to-employee portal deployments. For enterprises looking for a business-to-business solution, Novell extends AIP with additional services from Cambridge Technology Partners and Novell Identity Services to deliver its Secure Partner Portal (SPP). The SPP offering adds cost due to additional authentication, single sign-on and user provisioning features.

Novell recognizes that portals don't just "drop in" to the enterprise's environment. They require a significant amount of work upfront, including audience identification, governance and piloting — all of which Gartner believes Novell addresses effectively. Therefore, Novell customers should examine Novell Portal Services 1.5 as a viable alternative for deployment of a basic portal infrastructure. Although consulting services by Cambridge Technology Partners can extend the capabilities of the basic portal, long-term support may be costly because Novell Portal Services 1.5 involves custom code. Enterprises requiring a robust portal infrastructure with sophisticated personalization and integration features should evaluate other vendors.