Plumtree Software
| Company type | Public |
|---|---|
| Industry | Software |
| Founded | 1996 |
| Founder | Former product managers and engineers from Oracle and Informix |
| Defunct | October 2005 |
| Fate | Acquired by BEA Systems, later by Oracle Corporation |
| Headquarters | San Francisco , United States |
Area served | Enterprise software market |
| Products | Corporate Portal, Smart Enterprise Suite (Collaboration Server, Content Server, Search Server, Studio Server) |
| Parent | BEA Systems (2005–2008), Oracle Corporation (2008–present) |
Plumtree Software was established in 1996 by former product managers and engineers from Oracle and Informix, with investment backing from Sequoia Capital. The company was a trailblazer in adapting the web portal concept—initially popularized by consumer platforms like Yahoo!—for enterprise use. In October 2005, BEA Systems acquired Plumtree, which was subsequently purchased by Oracle. Today, Plumtree's portal solution continues to be part of Oracle's product lineup.
Directory, portlets, communities
The Corporate Portal, Plumtree’s primary offering, originated as a directory system inspired by Yahoo!, designed to consolidate content from file systems, websites, document repositories, and groupware into a unified enterprise knowledge management platform. By 1999, Plumtree enhanced this with self-service personalization through modular portlets (initially named "gadgets"), empowering users to tailor their portal interfaces. These portlets made complex corporate applications accessible to a wider user base. By the year 2000, community functionalities were introduced to support collaborative team spaces, resource centers for business units, and service portals for customers or partners.
Radical openness
In integrating various enterprise assets, Plumtree transformed web application architecture by enabling support for multiple application servers and programming languages through Internet protocols. This strategy, known as "radical openness," overcame the constraints of traditional portals that were limited to a single server or programming environment.
Experience revealed that hosting all portal services on a single application server was unfeasible due to the diversity of languages and servers in large enterprises. Additionally, local portlets posed risks of causing widespread outages if one component failed.
Consequently, in 2000 Plumtree redesigned its portal to interact with components via HTTP, permitting services to operate remotely and be developed in any language. This design enhanced system stability by confining failures to individual components without disrupting the entire portal and facilitated integration of distributed enterprise services.
The parallel engine
The HTTP-based framework introduced performance challenges since each portal page depended on multiple components spread across different platforms. Existing HTTP connection libraries within application servers were inadequate in speed and scalability for extensive portal deployments.
To address this, Plumtree created the parallel engine in 2000—a software layer that enabled rapid, large-scale communication using Internet protocols. Independent evaluations demonstrated that the portal maintained robust performance even as the number of integrated services grew substantially; for example, increasing services tenfold only resulted in a minor performance reduction of about one-tenth of a second.
UNIX support
Although Plumtree’s Web Services Architecture permitted portal services to run on any platform, the portal software itself initially supported only Windows environments. As demand grew, supporting multiple platforms became critical.
In 2001, Plumtree released a UNIX-compatible version of its portal software developed with Java for both backend and user interface components. Due to its Web Services Architecture, services originally created for Windows portals could also connect seamlessly via HTTP to UNIX-based portals.
Plumtree positioned itself as the exclusive vendor delivering comprehensive Web technology solutions catering to both Microsoft- and Java-centric environments.
Standards for Web Services
By 2002, Plumtree had upgraded its Web Services Architecture on both Windows and UNIX platforms to enable remote components that could index a variety of content repositories, perform federated searches across multiple search engines, authenticate users from different directory services, and manage user preference profiles—all while remaining compatible with various application servers and programming languages.
To enable seamless sharing of user information and portal context among these components, Plumtree developed a proprietary Web services programming interface.
Support for Developers
Addressing the complexities of integrating across diverse development environments, Plumtree introduced the Enterprise Development Kit (EDK) in 2003. This toolkit was designed to complement Java and .NET frameworks, ensuring interoperable Web services functionality.
The EDK allowed developers to create Web services as if they were native objects, providing code that facilitated open and efficient communication between Web services operating on different platforms.
The Enterprise Web Concept
In early 2001, Plumtree broadened its product lineup by assembling an integrated suite of technologies later known as the "Smart Enterprise Suite" by Gartner. That year, Plumtree acquired RipFire for search capabilities, Hablador for web content management, ActiveSpace for web forms and data publishing, and initiated development of its own collaboration engine. After a year devoted to integration, these offerings were launched as Plumtree Collaboration Server, Content Server, Search Server, and Studio Server—each utilizing the portal’s built-in security and administrative features.
Expanding beyond a single portal focus, Plumtree embraced the "Enterprise Web" vision: a unified platform to manage all enterprise informational websites and web-based applications. However, initial deployments often resulted in portals with limited functionality due to heavy reliance on client-side JavaScript.
Initial Public Offering (IPO)
On June 4, 2002, Plumtree became publicly traded on the Nasdaq under the ticker symbol PLUM, successfully raising $42.5 million.
Acquisition
Although recognized as a portal market leader by Gartner Group, Plumtree was acquired by BEA Systems in October 2005. Following the acquisition, its products were rebranded within BEA’s Aqualogic portfolio. Subsequently, in April 2008, Oracle Corporation purchased BEA Systems and incorporated Aqualogic into Oracle Web Center.