TIBCO Software Inc. announced the general availability of PortalBuilder 5, which provides global customers with new feature-rich enhancements and a natural, cost-effective approach to deploy portal solutions that harness the power of a Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA).

Now more than ever, portals are being seen as the linchpin or face of SOA, helping customers become more nimble and responsive through the timely personalized delivery of relevant information assets. PortalBuilder 5 provides enterprise organizations with a unified presentation layer for SOA. It consumes services and easily integrates non-SOA applications and content to enable composite applications that efficiently deliver targeted, user-centric views to the right people at the right time.

"The availability of TIBCO PortalBuilder 5 strengthens our comprehensive service-oriented strategy by simplifying the face of SOA," said Ram Menon, senior vice president of worldwide marketing at TIBCO. "Our continued focus on usability and strong support for industry standards has resulted in the delivery of a cost-effective portal platform that allows companies to quickly react to changing market dynamics with targeted composite applications."

TIBCO PortalBuilder 5 provides customers with a flexible, configuration-driven interface that minimizes the need for custom coding to help reduce the time and cost to deploy portals. The intuitive interface of TIBCO PortalBuilder 5 also reduces information technology bottlenecks by facilitating delegated administration to allow business users to play a more active role in the development, deployment and management of portals. In addition, PortalBuilder's enriched capabilities allow customers to more rapidly and cost-effectively derive benefits from their SOA by simplifying the process of consuming, assembling and then delivering services to users throughout the extended enterprise.

TIBCO's latest portal offering is based on several key standards including the Java Specification Request 168 -- a Java API for portlet interoperability -- and Web Services for Remote Portlets (WSRP). This enables the seamless integration of a wide range of content and applications, as well as the consumption and syndication of portlets with other WSRP-compliant portal solutions. Additionally, TIBCO PortalBuilder 5 supports a variety of infrastructure components, such as servlet engines, database servers and other infrastructure technologies for deployment within heterogeneous environments.

Furthermore, TIBCO PortalBuilder 5 interacts seamlessly with TIBCO's comprehensive integration and business process management solutions, as well as TIBCO General Interface (GI) to allow customers to fully leverage these solutions' capabilities inside the portal environment. The combination of TIBCO PortalBuilder and TIBCO GI -- an AJAX-based solution for developing rich Internet applications -- provides customers with the industry's most advanced rich portal. Together, these technologies enable a highly interactive and responsive user experience, allowing customers to develop and deploy rich composite applications within their portals.