Plumtree Makes Composite-App Play

Plumtree Software Inc. is applying its expertise in portal presentation software to composite applications in an effort to help enterprises streamline business process automation.

At its Odyssey user conference in Hollywood, Fla., next month, Plumtree will lay out a plan for enhancing its tools so that Java and .Net developers can integrate third-party applications and create new automated IT processes.

“Its a profound change going from a portal presentation layer to a platform for building composite applications, of which the portal is only one application,” said John Kunze, president and CEO of San Francisco-based Plumtree. “We mitigate vendor lock-in and long-term [data model] dependencies.”

At the conference, Plumtree will release APIs for its namesake Collaboration Server that will give developers better access to data in their enterprise applications, Microsoft Corp. Office applications and portals. APIs for the companys publishing software, Content Server, will be available by the end of the year, Kunze said.

Composite applications are application templates that get populated with customer data, Kunze said. The first such packaged composite applications will likely address life sciences and retail companies, he said, declining to provide a time frame.

MDS Capital Corp., which has used Plumtree Corporate Portal for three years, has already begun creating composite applications. “Plumtree has security, user groups and all that type of management; for us, those are pieces we didnt have to build ourselves,” said Jackie Jenuth, director of business intelligence at the Toronto company. “It gave us a framework to build our applications in.”

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