Open Source Go-To-Market Success: Liferay CEO Bryan Cheung (Part 5)

Sramana: Does your software help IT organizations personalize work environments for their users?

Bryan Cheung: There are two things going on. The personalization aspect is now broadening: It is not just about personalization for the individual, it is about communities. It is about getting social with the work we are doing. You need to know what your colleagues are working on, and our systems need to detect that.

The second aspect is that the days of monolithic five-year waterfall software projects are done. Enterprises need to be able to model a process in the morning and have an application that reflects that model by the afternoon. Enterprises cannot wait six to nine months to get an application to work. They need solutions in Internet time.

Liferay provides a platform where developers and users can build applications to solve business problems in a matter of weeks or months. The problems should be solved in a couple of days.

Sramana: The concept of portals have been around for a long time. There were companies selling portals when you were in school, but you are describing agile portals that do not require long digestion periods and tons of professional services.

Bryan Cheung: We are in an interesting position because if you look at WebSphere, they are doing several hundred million dollars of revenue. There are cases for monolithic portals. The New York Stock Exchange is going to want a robust, well-planned portal. We are at a state of maturity for that.

The traditional portal use case is still being used by large enterprises, but if you look on the flip side at Microsoft SharePoint, you will see how excited businesses are at the fact that they can put together a form in a couple of hours. They can define a custom workflow to allow people to submit their expenses. That provides immediate value for users.

The traditional portal is our maturity market, but we anticipate that the rapid application development is where we are going to experience the most growth over the next five years.

Sramana: Are you somewhere in the middle between WebSphere and SharePoint?

Bryan Cheung: If we were to make our elevator pitch, we would say that we are faster to deploy than WebSphere and more flexible than SharePoint. SharePoint achieves what it does because Microsoft has technical control of the entire environment. It has tight integration with Outlook and Exchange as well as IIS and SQL Server. That means Microsoft can focus on a few key pieces of functionality that allow users to build functionality.

WebSphere, in its own way, keeps people locked in. They have a monolithic set of middleware that allows them to build almost anything. However, the level of complexity requires IBM’s professional services team to help you out. We have the flexibility to run on any of the application servers you have in-house. We can run on any of the databases. We can run in the cloud or behind your firewall.

We remain lightweight enough that if you download Liferay today and use our built-in functionality, you can stand up a perfectly good website and solid functionality in just a few weeks. Unlike Microsoft, because we adhere to open standards and we are flexible in our environment, there is tremendous leeway to customize your environment. At first you may have a static website, and you can add social features and CRM later.

Sramana: As you have developed your product roadmap, how has it evolved over time?

Bryan Cheung: Our core offerings are around portal and infrastructure and into social networking and collaboration, along with content management capabilities. If you want to go best of breed and tie in Liferay with some of the other packages out there, we can do that.

This segment is part 5 in the series : Open Source Go-To-Market Success: Liferay CEO Bryan Cheung
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