IBM WebSphere Portal (WP), IBM Web Experience Factory (WEF), and the cloud
Portals are single point of access for information, knowledge, business services, and transactions; providing aggregation and role-based access to Business to Business (B2B), Business to Consumer (B2C), Business to Employee (B2E); along with vertical and horizontal domain support. Portals also allow for that data to be served on a variety of devices, anytime, anywhere. From an architectural viewpoint, a portal is an architectural pattern implemented and realized via a product with out-of-the-box integration potentials and capabilities. From a technology standpoint, the IBM WebSphere Portal is a J2EE application with its engine being compliant with portal-specific APIs, such as JSR 168, JSR 286, and WSRP. So what is the cloud and how can it help you with your WP and WEF related initiatives? Let's first start with some basic definitions.
Cloud is a delivery model that uses virtualization to build, provision, deploy, and enable environments, resources, and services. More precisely, its canonical definition according to the working definition of cloud computing published by the U.S. Government's National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) is as follows:
Cloud computing can be described as a model for enabling ubiquitous, convenient, on-demand network access to a shared pool of configurable computing resources (for example, networks, servers, storage, applications, and services) that can be rapidly provisioned, and released with minimal management effort or service provider interaction.
To complement it, IBM defines cloud computing as follows:
Cloud computing changes the way we think about technology. Cloud is a computing model providing web-based software, middleware, and computing resources on demand. By deploying technology as a service, you give users access only to the resources they need for a particular task. This prevents you from paying for idle computing resources. Cloud computing can also go beyond cost savings by allowing your users to access the latest software and infrastructure offerings to foster business innovation.
