Kapow Technologies and its customers will benefit from the recently announced merger between BEA Systems and Plumtree Software, according to Kapow Vice President Lars B. Nielsen. Kapow Technologies has relationships with both BEA and Plumtree, and Nielsen believes the merger will help cement Kapow’s position for clipping applications into portals.

“We feel fortunate, as a smaller vendor and BEA/Plumtree partner, to have been selected by both vendors originally,” he said. “And so we think this merger is a really positive development for us and our joint clients with both BEA and Plumtree. These two companies combined cover about 20% of the global portal market, so in reality, this will make Kapow’s technology a de facto standard for importing, or clipping, applications into portals.“

Neilsen noted that Kapow Technologies also works with other portal vendors in the world in the same capacity. But in stressing the importance of the BEA/Plumtree merger, he noted that “both firms market the Kapow RoboSuite Web Integration platform as part of their portal solutions. Furthermore, BEA uses Web Integration for clipping applications into its portal framework, and Plumtree for both clipping and content migration into its content management system.”

Even though clipping still is a small part of the portal market, it is gaining traction as the preferred alternative to custom coding portlets. Nielsen said that most portal frameworks today depend upon customers to program each portlet and then manually migrate content into a Content Management System framework.

With Web Integration, like that seen in RoboSuite, the portlets are clipped and generated in a matter of hours or even minutes, with no reprogramming required. As a result, content migration becomes an automated process that can result in as much as a 90% savings in time and budget, Nielsen said.