Enterweb, an EOH KPMG Consulting (formerly known as Atos KPMG Consulting) company, today announced its appointment as the master distributor for Plumtree portal design software in southern Africa.
The appointment comes at a time when portals (single sign-on front-end integration tools used to integrate across all corporate systems and electronic data-sources) rank as the number one spending priority for CIOs globally*.
Plumtree is ranked by Meta Group as the clear portal market leader based on performance, by IDC as the number one portal product offering based on market share, and by AMR Research as number one for customer satisfaction.
"Our Plumtree appointment is significant to us and the market. Portal spending is being driven by the urgent requirement for increased revenue enhancement front office applications and better and faster management of information. It also supports our market approach of providing strategic solutions for our customers across the entire IT platform." says Asher Bohbot, CEO of EOH.
Enterweb, which will focus on the marketing of Plumtree, is extremely excited about its appointment: "Plumtree is globally regarded as the world`s leading portal product. Plumtree Software is not aligned to any back-end application or development standard. It is a truly open portal framework that integrates easier and more effectively to more systems and data sources than any other competing product. Its launch in SA bridges an important gap that has existed in the local portals market where offerings have been bundled and aligned with the interests of large IT vendors," says Andries Louw, managing director, Enterweb.
"We will market, sell and support Plumtree while the design and implementation will be managed by partners, including EKC Portals, the portals-focused business of EOH, which is currently the only dedicated portals deployment business in SA," comments Louw.
EKC Portals has gained significant practical experience in the design and deployment of world-class portals for companies such as Anglo American and British American Tobacco. Although EKC Portals will remain focused on the design and deployment of portals using various vendor products, it will also co-ordinate and lead the Plumtree portals design and deployment effort.
Simplistically, portals are tools used to connect every system and data-source in a company to a single platform and distributing this information to each user based on their role and access rights in the company. This in itself might not seem like a major enhancement, but if you consider the potential benefits and usage of such a solution, it changes the way information is managed, the way people interact with systems and each other, and the way in which people work.
Portals eliminate multiple log-on procedures and passwords into different systems, reduce duplication of data and systems, and limit the frustrations associated with empty searches for data or information. Access to every electronic system from anywhere can be provided from any device. This is why portals are playing such a critical role in the future of IT architectures everywhere.
In 1997, Plumtree created and introduced the phenomenon of portals to the business world. What still sets Plumtree apart from other competing products is the core principles it follows in developing its products:
* Radical openness: using Internet protocols to be the leader, supporting multiple application servers, programming languages and applications.
* Using the enterprise Web: providing a complete solution for assembling, managing and delivering Web applications, including portal, search, integration, collaboration and content management in one cohesive suite, achieving the lowest total cost of ownership.
* Enterprise productivity: building on Plumtree`s expertise in knowledge management and collaboration, to create a work environment that the entire extended enterprise can use to find information, manage projects, share documents and publish content.
According to the latest SmithBarney research, portals are the number one spending priority for Fortune 1000 and global 1000 companies in 2004. According to Louw, portal technology has already started changing the IT landscape and the IT architectures of vendors and companies globally. The introduction of Plumtree in SA is signalling the start of a new era of IT in our market.
* Smith Barney December 2003 CIO Macro Trends Survey
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