Jeff Seifert (IBM): The news is this ... Portal Now is an innovative solution offering for deploying meaningful business applications, internal to an organization, external to their customers and suppliers, to help companies get content-rich portals up in 16 days.

That's from scratch.

Sharad Kumar (Prolifics): Customers look at it and they say "Wow!"

In three weeks, you have a platform in place that is giving you enterprise-level solutions, is giving you a base to push content out very quickly to your customers, and then you can start adding (what we now call at IBM) the accelerators — really pushing a lot of functionality very quickly to the end users without having to spend a huge amount of time really building that out.

Handly Cameron (Softchoice): If you have the capability to go through a standard install on a standard configuration, then [you] quickly get that out, as well as the training that goes with it.

Jeff Seifert: They can take this great portal-based solution built with Portal Now and start to incorporate Dashboards that gives them business intelligence. They can start to integrate the back-end systems and profile that information based on the users within their company.

And they can start to incorporate our social technologies that help grow their business, inform their customers and suppliers, and really start to expand their reach, their brand, all aspects of their business and the high degree of sophistication that is needed today in business.

Handly Cameron: The nice thing about Portal Now is you deployed a foundation that you can then grow on, to add other capabilities in. IBM's already taken best practices, has taken the needs of companies across industries, and delivered value for what that particular industry needs.

Jeff Seifert: That may be healthcare, it may be retail, it may be in the legal profession. We've been rolling this out to our primary root market which is our Business Partners — they see this as a way to accelerate their ability to serve their customers. And now what they can capitalize on is our extended capabilities within the WebSphere Portal portfolio.

Sharad Kumar: The big and powerful aspect about Portal Now really is that we are able to show what we will get at the end of the three weeks. There's no ambiguity, there's no gray area — it's absolutely crystal clear. And there's a huge amount of value our customers see knowing that "Wow! I can basically have a dynamic way of pushing targeted and secure information out to my constituents without really having to wait six months to get a system in place."

It's three weeks! And you're up and running.

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About the author

Scott Laningham, host of developerWorks podcasts, was previously editor of developerWorks newsletters. Prior to IBM, he was an award-winning reporter and director for news programming featured on Public Radio International, a freelance writer for the American Communications Foundation and CBS Radio, and a songwriter/musician.

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Next steps from IBM

• Try: WebSphere Portal Express
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• Buy: WebSphere Portal Express