Accelerators are business specific packages that easily integrate existing portal and address a specific business need. With the delivery of three new accelerators, IBM now offers customers all five of the initial accelerators identified as part of a new strategy announced April 2007 for the portal market. The Dashboard accelerator was announced late April while Workforce Management for HR self-service was made available in July.

 

IBM uses Web 2.0 technologies and targeted business packages to help drive innovation and productivity for its customers while preserving their initial WebSphere Portal investments. With over 5000 customer deployments, IBM has the largest customer base for portal - giving it the widest range of experience.

 

IBM gives customers a single portal foundation to support the evolving and varied needs of their organization. Customers may choose to start with WebSphere Portal Server and the appropriate accelerator to meet a given business challenge, such as the Collaboration Accelerator for instant interaction with people and teams. When they are ready for a new project, they simply "snap on" additional accelerators to meet additional business needs, such as the Dashboard Accelerator for real-time key performance indicators and decision making; or the Self-Service Accelerator to empower employees and reduce administrative HR costs.

 

“Our simple approach of a single, standards based, portal platform, and easy to integrate accelerators is giving customers the maximum flexibility and choice to address their business needs and are making portals the irresistible choice for advance web user interactions, ” said Larry Bowden, vice president of portals and interaction services. “The significant developments we’ve made to the product line in 2007 leverages over 1/2 decade of being a leader in the portal market with compelling new technical advances in SOA, Web 2.0, mashups, and easy of use, preintegration packages that will help our customers keep their portal the best in the industry.

 

Three new accelerators include:

Collaboration – This package offers tools that drive team collaboration, organizational knowledge sharing and improve productivity, using Lotus Quickr, Lotus Sametime and Lotus Connections for use within WebSphere Portal. The Collaboration Accelerator includes team workspaces, document libraries, presence awareness and Sametime Instant Messaging, web conferencing, people profiles and directories, and enterprise social networking features like blogs, wikis, shared bookmarking and communities.

Content – This accelerator provides customers ways to build and manage websites, intranets, extranets, and portals with features from Workplace Web Content Management, Portal Document Management and OmniFind Enterprise Edition. Content can be easily created using intuitive, web-based tools and then delivered with a high level of personalization to site visitors. The Content Accelerator improves productivity and allows organizations to keep web content current, accurate, and up-to-date without sacrificing brand identity or corporate web standards.

Enterprise Suite – As a comprehensive package, the Enterprise Suite supports multiple portal projects, including Web content management, collaboration, electronic forms, dashboards, advanced search, and offline rich client support. The Enterprise Suite provides a robust combination of multiple accelerators, including Content, Collaboration and Dashboards and related technology including elements of Lotus Forms and Lotus Expeditor to help IT keep pace with the demanding online needs of the business.

In August, IBM's portal was positioned by Gartner, Inc. in the leaders quadrant in its Horizontal Portal Magic Quadrant 2007.1 "The leaders in this Magic Quadrant have a full range of capabilities to support all portal deployment scenarios, and have demonstrated consistent product delivery over a considerable period to meet customer needs, significant product innovation and continued success in selling to new customers."