Epicentric at the crossroads of portals and web services
- Article 9 of 77
- Information Age, May 2001
As one of the initial San Francisco dot-com high-fliers, Epicentric believes that companies miss something if they do not see the value in building enterprise and vertical portals for employees, customers or partners.
As one of the initial San Francisco dot-com high-fliers, Epicentric believes that companies miss something if they do not see the value in building enterprise and vertical portals for employees, customers or partners. Epicentric's platform enables companies to create the infrastructure through which users work with key applications, access data and documents, and share groupware facilities such as email, online discussion, calendars and content.
Initially, Epicentric focused on services for intranets, but under the supervision of CEO Michael Crosno, who says he likes “to rescue good technology from bad business models”, it moved into software for extranets, with a particular focus on portals.
The company's Portal Server is 100% Java-based, enabling it to interface with virtually any content or application portfolio. Having already made a name for itself in the corporate portals market alongside the likes of Viador and Plumtree, the company now wants to build “the next generation of portals”. Here, the emphasis will be on the hot area of 'web services' - where users are connected to the online application as and when it is needed. To support this, the company raised $40 million in venture funding in March 2001, adding to the $44 million it has received since its inception in January 1998.
In web services, Epicentric has already unveiled a new payment system so that developers building web services that link to portals can bill customers direct. “In many ways, web services is the intersection of syndication and enterprise application integration,” says Ed Anuff, chief strategy officer. Investment bank Nomura is an early adopter of that web services technology.
Epicentric has also established content deals with companies such as Excite and iSyndicate, and alliances with other software vendors such as content management company Documentum. How far it can take that marriage of portals and web services remains to be seen, however.