Understanding Liferay Portal's Business Value. and Critical Measures for Success

Transcription

1 Understanding Liferay Portal's Business Value and Critical Measures for Success

2 Contents Introduction... 1 Basics of Liferay s Value... 2 A global user base... 2 Enterprise level support for open source software... 2 Scaling for high-availability and large deployments... 3 Product security and stability... 3 Product adaptability and compatibility... 3 Deployment flexibility... 4 A look at the competition... 4 Ease of installation... 5 Ease of customization and future upgrades and maintenance... 6 Quality of services rd party integration and plugins... 6 Cloud and SaaS offerings... 7 Additional costs and Total Cost of Ownership (TCO)... 8 Summary... 8 Moving Forward... 8 Liferay Portal Enterprise Edition Support... 8 Liferay Global Services... 8

3 Introduction Liferay Portal At A Glance Product Created: 2000 Company Founded: 2004 License: LGPL (CE), Commercial (EE) Business Model: Dual-License Open Source; Enterprise Edition provides support similar to proprietary products Liferay Portal is the most popular open-source enterprise portal on the market today as evidenced by the number and complexity of deployments worldwide, the continual growth of its client base, the size of its community, and ongoing recognition of its excellence. Gartner names Liferay Portal as a Leader in its Magic Quadrant for Horizontal Portals where Liferay is the sole open source player in the company of industry giants IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, and SAP. Challengers Leaders Microsoft Oracle IBM Ability to execute OpenText Red Hat (JBoss) Drupal edge IPK DotNetNuke exo SAP Liferay salesforce.com Covisint Adobe Backbase United Planet Niche Players Visionaries Completeness of vision Created in 2000, the product is available in both a Community Edition (CE) and an Enterprise Edition (EE), with the latter offering a commercial license and various levels of support. Today, Liferay is one of the most mature and widely used commercial open source solutions on the market, with deployments ranging from mission critical applications to small departmental projects with varying levels of sophistication in integration and design. This paper addresses key considerations when evaluating Liferay Portal for your enterprise, including: Total cost and ROI of open source Product roadmap and company portfolio Competitive product features Company background and viability Familiarity with Liferay and with open source support programs 1

4 Basics of Liferay s Value A global user base It is important to consider the quality and size of a solution s user base. Liferay enjoys a fast-growing client base that includes marquee names such as Barclays, Cisco Systems, China Mobile, the United Nations, and leading investment banks around the world. It also boasts a wide reaching developer community that actively contributes to the enhancement of the product by contributing code and proactively providing feedback about our features and users' own needs: 75,000 technical Liferay.com members Over 7 million downloads Over 500,000 known deployments worldwide Support for over 40 languages Over 249,000 forum posts and enormous knowledge base This is notable as it offers unique benefits over proprietary competitors, including: Worldwide participation in the development of: A knowledge base that includes contributed forums, wikis, and blogs. An online forum for answering timely questions (forums). Broad based reviews of and suggestions to the product s current roadmap. A global network of experts identifying security issues and resolutions. Ability for developers to understand and access source code in order to propose and implement changes. Ability to define extensions with deep integration to source code. Ease of access to application binaries for quick prototype testing. Worldwide support for localization of binaries and ancillary documentation. Liferay s open source backbone has allowed it to more easily proliferate worldwide than its proprietary competitors that require a sales force to access new customers and users. Thanks to this, Liferay is being deployed across industries in a diverse range of use cases around the world. Enterprise level support for open source software Liferay Portal Enterprise Edition (EE) is a commercial open source product that enjoys the benefits of the open source community while providing those users who need it with a commercial license at various levels of support. Depending on the tier of service, enterprises can get up to 24x7 support with Service Level Agreements with guaranteed support response times as short as one hour for critical production issues. Liferay s support is world-class and issues can be reported through the Liferay Enterprise Support Application (LESA). 2

5 Liferay Portal additionally certifies and tests with many different operating systems, application servers, and databases. Liferay also supports other technologies and protocols such as: LDAP, CAS, OpenSSO, SiteMinder, OpenID, Tivoli, Oracle AM, Novell Identity Manager, MS Exchange HTML5, CSS3, JavaScript, YUI3 JSON, WebDAV, Hibernate, ehcache, CMIS, JGroups, Lucene, REST, WSRP Spring, Struts, Seam, Tapestry, Velocity Learn more: Scaling for high-availability and large deployments Liferay Portal EE is tuned against all major application servers and databases for optimal performance under load. Custom-configured to meet the mission-critical speed and scalability needs of large enterprise deployments, EE offers all the essential capabilities of the core Liferay product in production-ready form. Learn more: Liferay Portal 6.1 Performance Whitepaper Many existing Liferay Portal EE customers enjoy the benefits of a Liferay high availability cluster and configuration. Liferay Portal EE is configured for enterprise environments that require support for redundancy, failover, and load balancing to ensure maximum uptime of your Liferay-based solution. Exclusive EE features like improved memory management, CDN integration, and Terracotta support allow you to scale your system efficiently as your user base grows. Product security and stability Liferay Portal was benchmarked as one of the market's most secure portal platforms with its use of industry standard, government-grade encryption technologies. Subscribers to Liferay Portal EE benefit from additional security patches discovered by the customer network delivered via regular service packs. For browser-level security, Liferay Portal EE implements the Top 10 recommended best practices published by the OWASP organization. To ensure a stable product for enterprise customers, no new features are added to Liferay Portal Enterprise Edition, eliminating the risk of new defects being introduced by new features. Each Liferay Portal EE service pack is thoroughly tested using additional quality assurance processes to ensure that the product becomes more stable with each release. Product adaptability and compatibility Liferay Portal is designed to fit into a heterogeneous environment. Implementations can leverage existing architectural pieces (e.g., database, identity mgmt. software, etc.) and integrate with existing services (e.g., via SOAP, REST, etc.). Many customers leverage 3

6 Liferay because they currently deploy several application stacks and services and they want an unbiased component to pull services together. Liferay also allows enterprises to use what they know by supporting a diverse matrix of software: Deployment flexibility OS DB App Server Servlet Container RHEL Oracle Weblogic Tomcat SUSE MySQL Websphere Resin Ubuntu IBM DB2 JBoss Jetty CentOS PostgresSQL GlassFish AIX SQL Server Sun JSAS HP-UX Sybase Oracle AS OSX JOnAS Solaris Geronimo Windows...and more! Deployment flexibility offers three main advantages to enterprises: 1. Ability to leverage existing infrastructure components (e.g., existing IdM software) 2. Ability to sit across disparate existing systems (e.g., on top of an IBM stack and an Oracle database) 3. Ability to be leveraged in multiple departments with varying infrastructure expertise/requirements, e.g., the same skills used to develop a customer portal based on Liferay running on IBM Websphere, can be used to build a sales dashboard built on Liferay running on JBoss with a MySQL backend. A look at the competition While major stack vendors have extremely broad portfolios and extensive services capabilities, customers are increasingly concerned as to the lower than expected return on investment they offer. The main concerns seem to center around the following: 1. Installation cost and complexity Many customers are finding that the cost of implementing new services and making changes means a great deal of extra cost. This lowers their ability to test ideas and often lengthens project timelines as well as over all costs. 2. Administration difficulties and reliability Extended complexity, even when meant to ensure reliability, most often lowers reliability due to the complexity involved in maintaining an overall architecture. It also means many customers are forced to exponentially increase administration costs, which lowers the ability to make changes to the system. 4

7 3. Obfuscation of pricing Proprietary software vendors have quickly learned that once an extensive, and complex system is completed, customers are unable or unwilling to budget to migrate away from the project. Pricing, therefore, has become increasingly hard to understand from proprietary vendors, often requiring a complex calculation on initial cost and a lack of guarantee of long-term costs. 4. Feature spread Many features required to implement a new service are spread across several products or components. This means additional costs and increased architectural complexity. 5. Product chaining As with feature spread, many features used to evaluate the capability of a product are often distributed across several products. These products are then implemented to require other products in a product chaining effect whereby if you want feature X, you will require product Y, which necessitates you have product Z. 6. Agility All of the examples above lower an enterprise s ability to make changes. This includes the ability to do early prototypes, too. Without the ability to make changes affordably, or consistently, enterprises lack the ability to create methods for continual improvement and they fall behind in the competitiveness. Additionally, with no stack agenda, Liferay allows customers to leverage existing pieces and skills and allows enterprises to use Liferay on top of several disparate stacks as a neutral architectural layer. This neutrality allows customers flexibility in making decisions going forward, allowing them to replace or reconfigure stacks as necessary. Other stack vendors will require pieces to change based on their product choices. Ease of installation Liferay installation and initial setup is extremely quick (less than 7 min for download and install on a developer s laptop) allowing enterprises to quickly prototype ideas and initial design proposals. Implementations are further simplified by its extremely lightweight footprint allowing higher reliability due to reduced architectural complexity. For example, the Liferay Portal 6.1 EE Tomcat bundle is only 255MB while the Liferay Portal 6.1 EE WAR and dependency jars take up only 185MB. Customers have the option of using one of the available bundles or using the WAR and jar files to manually install Liferay Portal to an existing servlet container or Java application server. You can download Liferay Portal CE and Liferay Portal EE (30-Day Trial): Installation Instructions: Cloud-hosted options available via official Liferay partners: 5

8 Ease of customization and future upgrades and maintenance Liferay Portal provides a modular, plugin architecture for extending existing functionality. Liferay IDE and Liferay Developer Studio are designed for Liferay Portal CE and Liferay Portal EE, respectively, and are built to run on top of the popular Eclipse IDE. Even though the source code is provided, you will never have to dig through source code to see what changes you have made. Liferay Plugins SDK allows you to create separate projects that sit on top of the portal. These plugins build into modular WAR files that can be hot deployed to Liferay Portal, avoiding downtime and speeding up development. Liferay Developer Studio builds on the core of Liferay IDE to deliver richer features and wizards. For more information on Liferay IDE and Liferay Developer Studio: Quality of services Liferay, Inc. specializes in portals and Liferay Global Services has among the most experienced, creative consultants and technology architects in the industry. Liferay consultants have broad experience with deployments involving a mixture of technologies, new and old. In addition, Liferay has an official, certified network of partners that not only specialize in Liferay Portal, but in various industries and verticals. Learn more about our partners: 3rd party integration and plugins Liferay s platform is built on open standards for ease of integration. Moreover, Liferay Marketplace has a variety of solutions for added functionality and integration with Liferay Portal. From the Jasper Reports app, to the Microsoft SharePoint Connector, to SAML 2.0 Provider plugin, Liferay plugins are a modular way to integrate with, and leverage, your existing technologies. For more information on Liferay Marketplace: 6

9 In addition, you can develop your own custom plugins using Liferay Developer Studio. Liferay plugins can be portlet applications, themes, layouts, or web plugins that deliver back-end functionality. Do you have a custom in-house web application that you need to integrate with? Do you have a legacy system or database that has no front-end? Liferay Developer Studio can help you. Add to this the tremendous library of sample plugins that Liferay provides, and this freedom and flexibility brings tremendous value. Cloud and SaaS offerings Liferay Portal is deployable to the cloud and virtualized environments. Official Liferay technology partners that host Liferay in the cloud include, with many more in the pipeline: Microsoft Azure CloudBees BitNami Omegabit Standing Cloud (this partnerships allows for deployment to multiple backend repositories) Liferay has also been tested and deployed to Amazon EC2, Elastic Beanstalk, VMWare, and more. For more information, read the "Liferay in the Cloud" whitepaper. 7

10 Additional costs and Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) All Liferay Community Edition (CE) plugins are free. Virtually all Liferay Portal EE plugins that run on top of Liferay Portal EE are included in the cost of the core Liferay Portal EE product. One exception is Liferay Social Office, which is a separate companion product to Liferay Portal. The majority of our plugins are available in both CE and EE versions and total roughly that perform functionality in the areas of content management, collaboration, social networking, and productivity. When evaluating Liferay Portal against other horizontal portal vendors, it is very important to consider the cost of these plugins that deliver extra functionality. For example, IBM WebSphere Portal does not include what IBM calls accelerators in the cost. The cost of the license of IBM WebSphere Application Server (AS) on top of IBM WebSphere Portal is also a factor. If you choose Oracle Weblogic Portal, consider the cost of Oracle WebLogic AS as well. For SharePoint, consider the cost of Microsoft Windows licenses, among other things. These are just examples of considerations, but if you add up the TCO of these vendors compared to Liferay, the savings can be very significant with Liferay Portal. Summary Liferay Portal eliminates vendor lock in while delivering a solid, secure, and stable product that is built on popular standards and technology. Liferay s vibrant community allows cutting edge features and creativity to emerge with every release. The freedom and flexibility that Liferay provides shows up in your bottom line when considering the TCO in your technology stack. Moving Forward For more information about Liferay Portal, you can speak to someone on our international sales team about our support and consulting services. Liferay Portal Enterprise Edition Support Liferay Portal Enterprise Edition ensures stability and reliable technical support for your Liferay Portal installation and your organization s team, including a customer portal, product bulletins, security alerts, and support from over 150 partners worldwide. Contact sales@liferay.com for more information or to obtain a free 30 Day Trial. Liferay Global Services Liferay Global Services can help you in the design, planning, and implementation of your system. Various packages for getting started, architecture consultation, and performance tuning are also available. Please contact sales@liferay.com for more information. 8

11 LIFERAY, INC. is a provider of leading enterprise open source portal and collaboration software products, used by major enterprises worldwide, including Allianz, AutoZone, Cisco Systems, Lufthansa Flight Training, The French Ministry of Defense, and the United Nations. Liferay, Inc. offers professional services, technical support, custom development and professional training to ensure successful deployment in the most demanding IT environments. 2013, Liferay, Inc. All rights reserved