The AOS Pegasi Platform is the first system designed from the ground up specifically to deploy Enterprise Information Portals.

A portal is a gateway to information. It is not a product; it is a concept. It is a collection of application services that work together to facilitate access to information. The aggregation of these services and the ability for these services to work together are the real value of a portal system.

An Enterprise Information Portal (EIP) is a software platform that manages access to disparate corporate information and applications. It provides a single point of entry to structured and unstructured corporate data and supporting application services.

System Services

The Pegasi platform is the physical set of system and application services that make up and support a portal environment. A base set of system services make up the platform's plumbing. These system services manage the administration and deployment of application services as these application services are used by consumers to gain access to information. For example, services that validate users and log information about their activities are considered horizontal system services that can be leveraged by any application running in the environment. Conceptually then, Pegasi is a collection of applications, supported by system services, that consumers use to gain access to information (See Figure 1 and Figure 2 below). In this context, the Pegasi platform is a pseudo operating system.

Figure 1

Figure 2

Application Services

Application services can be defined as any process that presents information to a consumer. Every piece of information must have a user-interface. It follows then that every application service must have a user-interface whether that interface is an email client, a pager, desktop software, a web browser or a component/plug-in within a web browser. Some user-interfaces are developed specifically for an application service, as is the case with a reporting and analysis application or any desktop software package. Other application services use a generic presentation vehicle. For example, an alert service that notifies users of exceptions in data may use an email client or a pager as its user-interface.

A portal is not a development tool. It is a management and deployment vehicle. Earlier, the value of a portal was identified as the platform's ability to aggregate and integrate application services. On the Pegasi platform, applications that are not installed as base services within the portal are built outside of the portal and then registered with and deployed on the platform. These applications can be designed to be used as horizontal or vertical resources within the portal. For example, a sales forecasting application would most likely be used only within the context of sales forecasting. Search facilities and reporting and analysis, on the other hand, are necessary functions within many applications. As a result, a Pegasi portal may provide consumers with the ability to search structured and unstructured data using text-mapping technologies, analyze complex data using analysis tools, and forecast data using a forecasting application. Here, search and reporting and analysis services are set up to be used either as stand-alone applications or as a service to any application running on the platform (See Figure 3 below). Real value comes from the ability for the sales forecasting application to leverage the data searching and analysis functions as services within the portal.

Figure 3

Extensibility

A portal's platform should be extensible. On the Pegasi platform, the forecasting application mentioned above may be included as a base portal service but would more likely be purchased from a third-party or developed internally using standard development tools. In any case, the ability to add application services to the portal, again to be used with other applications or stand-alone, adds to a Pegasi portal's value as a pseudo operating system within the context of enterprise information management.