Press Release

OASIS WSRP Interop Demo Showcases New Portal Standard for Aggregating Content

BEA, Citrix, Gluecode, IBM, Oracle, Plumtree, Sun Microsystems, and Others Demonstrate Web Services for Remote Portlets OASIS Standard at Delphi Enterprise On-Demand Summit

San Francisco, CA, USA; 31 March 2004–Seven vendors collaborated to showcase interoperability of the recently approved OASIS Standard, Web Services for Remote Portlets (WSRP), at today’s Delphi Group Enterprise On-Demand Summit. Members of the OASIS WSRP Technical Committee demonstrated the use of WSRP to enable user-driven integration, by aggregating content from various sources and across multiple platforms. Together, they showed how portlets can be reused on portals via WSRP rather than requiring each portal to separately install a complete set of portlets. WSRP maximizes both control and availability for the portlet hosting site while minimizing costs for the remote portal sites.

"With WSRP, users browse through libraries of content and information resources, bringing them into portals and other applications through ‘plug-and-play’ integration," explained Nathaniel Palmer, analyst for the Delphi Group. "The WSRP OASIS Standard offers the opportunity to greatly reduce the cost of integration, without jeopardizing the integrity of information and content repositories."

In the OASIS WSRP Interop Demo, content from portlets running on five different platforms, including .NET, was aggregated and interacted with in a manner equal to that of locally hosted portlets. BEA, IBM, Oracle, and Plumtree provided test implementations of a WSRP Consumer within their portal servers.

"Without WSRP, this would require manual coding of integration points between portal vendors," noted Rich Thompson of IBM, chair of the OASIS WSRP Technical Committee. "With WSRP, portlet repositories continue to be maintained by the appropriate administrators, but the resources they provide are accessible to non-technical business users."

Industry Support for WSRP

"As an open source company, Gluecode is committed to open standards, and building enterprise-ready products built upon these standards," said Winston Damarillo, CEO of Gluecode. "The WSRP OASIS Standard allows enterprises to maximize the value of their portal deployments without being locked into any one platform. We are pleased to be contributing our expertise in portal and open source technologies to these standardization efforts."

"As a co-author and a leader of the WSRP and JSR 168 initiatives, IBM is very glad to see that WSRP interoperability between different vendors’ products has become a reality," said Tim Thatcher, Program Director of portal and workplace products for IBM. "Through WebSphere Portal, IBM will enable companies to integrate and publish portlets offered by WSRP compliant producers as WSRP services. Additionally, to drive adoption of the WSRP OASIS Standard, IBM is providing a free open source implementation of WSRP based on Tomcat to the Apache Software Foundation as well as an interoperability test suite available at IBM alphaworks."

"It’s great to see so many vendors demonstrating WSRP interoperability. We’re looking forward to the next round of standards that add services like crawlers, search, and profiling–services that, when combined with standard portlets, can be used to build service-oriented applications," said Glenn Kelman, vice president of marketing and product management for Plumtree. "We’ve made a commitment to Radical Openness, a strategy dedicated to ensuring our software works with the widest range of platforms and tools in the industry. In addition to demonstrating our WSRP portlets at today’s conference, we will teach developers to build applications using WSRP and other Web Services at our upcoming Advanced Developer Conference."

"Sun is delighted by the enthusiastic response around our support for the WSRP OASIS Standard in the latest version of Sun Java System Portal Server by both our customers and partners," said David Bryant, director of portal services at Sun Microsystems. "With the WSRP OASIS Standard, the integration of disparate applications and content in portals can be achieved in a tiny fraction of the time and cost usually associated with this type of deployment. Sun continues to participate in the development of the WSRP OASIS Standard, and we look forward to the ongoing benefits this standard brings to business and IT."

"Vignette is seeing increasing customer demand for the plug-and-play benefits that the WSRP OASIS Standard provides," said Ed Anuff, vice president of portal and collaboration solutions at Vignette Corporation. "As a member of the OASIS WSRP Technical Committee and a long-time leading proponent of open architecture and industry standards adherence, Vignette applauds the surge of interest in WSRP-compliant offerings. The real winners in sustained WSRP adoption are the organizations worldwide that can decrease cost of ownership and training on portal initiatives thanks to the standard’s inherent interoperability."

About OASIS

OASIS (Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards) is a not-for-profit, global consortium that drives the development, convergence, and adoption of e-business standards. Members themselves set the OASIS technical agenda, using a lightweight, open process expressly designed to promote industry consensus and unite disparate efforts. OASIS produces worldwide standards for security, Web services, conformance, business transactions, electronic publishing, topic maps and interoperability within and between marketplaces. Founded in 1993, OASIS has more than 3,000 participants representing over 600 organizations and individual members in 100 countries. http://www.oasis-open.org

Additional information:

OASIS WSRP Technical Committee http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/wsrp

Press contact:

Carol Geyer Director of Communications OASIS carol.geyer@oasis-open.org +1.978.667.5115 x209