WSRP Approved as OASIS Standard

["Carol Geyer" <carol.geyer@oasis-open.org>]

Web Services for Remote Portlets (WSRP) Approved as OASIS Standard

BEA Systems, Citrix Systems, Factiva, IBM, Microsoft, Novell, Oracle,
Plumtree Software, Reed Elsevier, SAP, Sun Microsystems, TIBCO,
Vignette, and Other OASIS Members Standardize Integration of User-Facing
Web Services

Boston, MA, USA; 11 September 2003 -- The OASIS standards consortium
today announced that its members have approved Web Services for Remote
Portlets (WSRP) version 1.0 as an OASIS Standard, a status that
signifies the highest level of ratification. WSRP standardizes the
consumption of Web services in portal front ends, as well as the way in
which content providers write Web services for portals.

"WSRP defines how Web services plug into portals," explained Delphi
president, Thomas Koulopoulos. "Once a WSRP service is  published to a
public directory, portal administrators are able to locate and
dynamically integrate it with just a few mouse clicks. WSRP is a critcal
standard enabling distributed portals to share portlets as visual,
user-facing Web services for integration with other portals."

WSRP eliminates the need for content aggregators to choose between
locally hosting a content source or writing code specific to each remote
content source. Instead, WSRP allows content to be hosted in the
environment most suitable for its execution while still being easily
accessed by content aggregators. The standard enables content producers
to maintain control over the code that formats the presentation of their
content. By reducing the cost for aggregators to access their content,
WSRP increases the rate at which content sources may be easily
integrated into pages for end-users.

"The OASIS WSRP Technical Committee was founded in early 2002 with the
vision of providing a single interface standard for all interactive,
presentation-oriented Web services. WSRP v1.0 succeeds in providing this
platform neutral definition of an interface," said Rich Thompson of IBM,
chair of the OASIS WSRP Technical Committee. "Early vendor support for
WSRP--we’ve tracked eight implementations to date--clearly demonstrates
the need for this standardized means of accessing remote content."

"WSRP builds on foundational work from the Worldwide Web Consortium
(W3C)," said Patrick Gannon, president and CEO of OASIS. "WSRP uses WSDL
to describe interfaces, and requires SOAP bindings for all conformant
services. WSRP is an excellent example of how an open, standards-based
approach will enable end-user interactive web services to be deployed in
a lower cost, faster-to-implement, plug-and-play environment."

WSRP allows remote portlet Web services to be implemented in a variety
of ways, including Java/J2EE and Microsoft's .NET platform.

WSRP is the result of a collaboration of 25 OASIS member companies
including BEA Systems, Citrix Systems, Factiva, IBM, Microsoft, Novell,
Oracle, Plumtree Software, Reed Elsevier, SAP, Sun Microsystems, TIBCO,
and Vignette. It joins a growing portfolio of OASIS Standards and
specifications for Web services including Universal Description,
Discovery, and Integration of Web Services (UDDI), Web Services Business
Process Language (WSBPEL), Web Services for Distributed Management
(WSDM), Web Services for Reliable Messaging (WSRM), WS-Security, and
others. OASIS currently has more than 60 active technical committees.

Industry Support for WSRP

BEA Systems
"WSRP 1.0 is an important step forward in expanding the reach and
ubiquity of portal technologies by providing standards that extend
customer applications to support federated portals," said Shane Pearson,
Group Product Manager, WebLogic Portal, BEA Systems, Inc (NASDAQ: BEAS).
"The increase in available content and applications, combined with the
ease of deployment and consistent APIs of the Java Portlet
Specification, both of which are available to BEA developers today, will
increase the return on investment and usefulness of portal solutions."

Computer Associates
"By providing a 'plug-n-play' standard that enables developers to
capture portal content from compliant sources and make that content
available to users in readily accessible portlets, WSRP unleashes the
full potential power of Web services," said Dmitri Tcherevik, vice
president and director of Web services at CA. "CA is committed to
supporting WSRP in our CleverPath information delivery solutions, and
providing the security and management support necessary to ensure that
WSRP-based business solutions are safe, reliable and scalable."

Factiva
"WSRP approval is a significant milestone for OASIS and for our
customers, especially as their enterprise portal deployments continue to
grow," said Mike Menna, associate vice president of Applications and
Integration of Products for Factiva. "For Factiva, the approval of WSRP
further validates our integration strategy dating back to early 2000.
Going forward, we will continue to work with our fellow OASIS WSRP
Technical Committee members to provide the best business intelligence
content at the point of decision."

IBM
"As a co-author and a leader of the WSRP and JSR 168 initiatives, IBM is
very glad to see that WSRP has been approved by OASIS as a formal
standard. IBM, through WebSphere Portal, will be enabled to integrate
WSRP services offered by any WSRP-compliant producer and to publish
portlets running on WebSphere Portal as WSRP services," said Larry
Bowden, vice president of Portals and Lotus products for IBM. "To push
for the quick adoption of the WSRP OASIS Standard by providers of
content and application services, IBM provides a free, open source
implementation of WSRP based on Tomcat and the Java Portlet API (JSR
168) Reference Implementation at the Apache Software Foundation - WSRP4J
(http://ws.apache.org/wsrp4j/), thus enabling third parties to implement
WSRP services by implementing JSR 168 portlets and making them available
as WSRP services which will plug into all WSRP-compliant portals."

Plumtree
"Plumtree was the first vendor to release a WSRP product to customers
and one of the only vendors whose WSRP software is built for use on many
different application servers. We've also demonstrated interoperability
with all WSRP test implementations including those offered by BEA, IBM,
Oracle, and Citrix," said Plumtree CEO, John Kunze. "Plumtree will
continue its role as an active participant in the OASIS WSRP Technical
Committee and other standards bodies. We also hope to guide standards
beyond just portlets to include other key elements for building rich
applications, such as Web services for indexing content, importing user
profiles and security, and for federating searches. Creating a world of
standardized, interoperable portals is an ambitious vision--the
finalization of WSRP is an important first step."

Sun Microsystems
"We fully support the WSRP standard as it will be a key driver of Web
services adoption in the portal marketplace," said David Bryant,
director of marketing for the Sun ONE Portal Server, Sun Microsystems,
Inc. "Sun is committed to helping our customers build federated portals
that deliver easy access to services for their end-users through
standards such as WSRP, Liberty, and JSR 168."

Vignette
"The WSRP OASIS Standard and its 'plug-and-play' structure for diverse
user-facing Web applications, including portals, will help organizations
rapidly assimilate information from across the enterprise to provide a
better customer experience," said Ed Anuff, vice president of strategy
at Vignette. "Vignette continues its long-standing push to define and
promote open
standards, in turn giving its customers maximum flexibility and the
opportunity to reduce complexity while speeding deployment and time to
benefit."

WebCollage
"As a leader in enabling companies to integrate interactive applications
across Web systems, WebCollage is proud to have played a role in the
development of the WSRP 1.0 specification, and we are pleased to see the
support it has received," said Gil Tayar, Chief Technology Officer at
WebCollage, Inc. "WSRP has the potential to do for interactive
applications what SOAP did for the programmatic services, by making it
easier and cost effective to integrate application functionality across
a large number of portals. WebCollage customers benefit from the ability
to repurpose existing Web applications as WSRP-enabled remote portlets."



About OASIS (http://www.oasis-open.org):
OASIS (Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information
Standards) is a not-for-profit, global consortium that drives the
development, convergence, and adoption of e-business standards. Members
themselves set the OASIS technical agenda, using a lightweight, open
process expressly designed to promote industry consensus and unite
disparate efforts. OASIS produces worldwide standards for security, Web
services, conformance, business transactions, electronic publishing,
topic maps and interoperability within and between marketplaces. Founded
in 1993, OASIS has more than 2,000 participants representing over 600
organizations and individual members in 100 countries.


Press contact:
Carol Geyer
Director of Communications
OASIS (www.oasis-open.org)
carol.geyer@oasis-open.org
+1.978.667.5115 x209