A portal is only as good as the data sources that feed into it and that goes for corporate intranet portals as well as for consumer-oriented web portals. So with the second cut of its enterprise portal software, InfoImage Inc has added dozens and dozens more sources compared to the previous version, launched in April. The Phoenix Arizona-based company will today announce version 1.5 of Freedom, as its software is known, with what it grandly calls a federated architecture.
InfoImage’s differentiator against the competitors it doesn’t like to even acknowledge having, such as Plumtree, Viador, Brio/Sqribe and Epicentric is both the number of data sources it can deal with and the variety. Not only can it handle a lot more than they can, says Jonathan Michaels, co-founder and VP marketing and product management, it can also handle both structured and unstructured data. For example, Plumtree doesn’t connect to ERP software, says Michaels. Other companies may provide the data but do not have the tools to turn that data into useful business information, he says.
However, Freedom does require the users to have at least one license of Lotus Domino running for 1.5 to work, although it plans to make the product more agnostic in future releases. The Domino dependency is a vestige of the company’s earlier life as a Lotus Notes shop. Freedom can link into a variety of mail systems, including Exchange and GroupWise. ERP and other data sources include JD Edwards, PeopleSoft, Lawson, SAP, Siebel and Vantive, among others and it can link to transaction connectors including BEA Tuxedo, CICS, and MQ Series. It runs on Windows NT.
Details of how the new architecture differs from the previous version are scarce, but Michaels says it can handle upwards of 500 concurrent users per server – 1.0 topped out at about 350 – and multiple servers can be linked together and balanced more easily than previously, he says. The software is effectively an application platform based around workflow that enables the various parts of an organization to talk to one another and share work and ideas. The company has also produced a packaged sales force application based on Freedom.
On a corporate level, InfoImage is looking to grow rapidly through acquisitions and is looking for more mid-sized Microsoft- based system integration companies that know NT and COM thoroughly. InfoImage has about 300 employees now. Freedom 1.5 will ship at the start of next month and is priced on a per user subscription basis, costing around $500 per user per year at low volumes, dropping to about $150 for thousands of users. There is also an outright purchase options, costing double one year’s subscription.
