Air Force begins rollout of BroadVision powered portal.

BroadVision, Inc. (Nasdaq:BVSN), a provider of enterprise business portal applications, recently announced that the U.S. Air Force has begun deployment of the BroadVision-powered Air Force Portal, providing Air Force personnel with the right information, at the right time, in the right format, to any location--while reducing the total cost of ownership through a centralized web infrastructure.

"Our BroadVision-powered portal gives Air Force people the ability to view information needed to do their job without regard to the system managing that information," said Col. Norris Connelly, director of systems and technology in the office of the Air Force's chief information officer. "Ultimately, this means a maintainer stationed anywhere in the world could log on to a computer, check e-mail, get the status of ordered parts, find out the scheduled take-off time for the aircraft that needs those parts, and get information pushed to him based on individual interests and profile, with nothing more than a web browser loaded on a desktop computer with network access."

Air Force personnel receive information from many sources and in many forms, for example a briefing summary, a message from a commander, a remote sensor, a notification of an aircraft maintenance technical order change, a notification of a new training program, or an air-tasking order. The problem was not access to information, but too much information. The Air Force recognized that they could improve efficiencies--and reduce infrastructure costs--by using a portal framework to provide centralized access to relevant information. After evaluating solutions from 22 vendors, the USAF chose BroadVision to provide the portal solution that would allow them to consolidate hundreds of legacy systems at 110 air bases worldwide into a single point of access.

Air Force personnel assigned to Air Combat Command, headquartered at Langley Air Force Base, Virginia, were the first to log on to the new USAF Portal beginning December 2002. When fully deployed, the Air Force Portal will serve 1.3 million users worldwide.

Features include:

Customizable Workspaces and Channels: Users have the ability to choose the information that will be presented at log in, including one-click access to sites and applications they use in their jobs, user-specific USAF career and benefits information and access to communities of interest.

Profile- and Role-Based Personalization: Site content can be tailored to the needs and interests of particular users based on information in their personal profiles. Content can be segmented according to profile elements such as organization, installation, supervisory responsibilities, rank and duty. Content can also be filtered based on roles. For example, a member of the Logistics Group will have access to content not automatically "pushed" to a member of the Chief Information Office.

Collaboration Tools: The portal provides a set of tools that allow colleagues to collaborate, share knowledge and manage projects online in a virtual workspace. Through these microsites, group members can share project information, access knowledge libraries and participate in threaded discussions related to their project or area of interest.

Scalable Architecture: The new portal is designed to serve the long-term information and capacity needs of the Air Force. Leveraging BroadVision's experience with other large government sites and mass retailers like Sears and Wal*Mart, the project team has implemented a robust enterprise software solution with "room to grow."

Future enhancements call for single sign-on, which will eliminate the need to remember and supply a user-id and password for each application a user accesses through the portal. The infrastructure to support single sign-on is already part of BroadVision's portal framework.

"The U.S. Air Force intended to transform and improve the way people work and the portal is their key enabler," said Sanjay Gupta, senior vice president of marketing and alliances, BroadVision. "This is a case where the government is setting a benchmark for industry best practices in terms of reducing costs and streamlining access to mission-critical tools and information. We look forward to assisting the U.S. Air Force with future enhancements to the USAF Portal."

BroadVision's (Nasdaq:BVSN) enterprise business portal applications create immediate bottom line value by transforming the way organizations do business--moving relationships with employees, partners and customers to a personalized, self-service model that increases revenues, reduces costs and improves productivity. BroadVision is the leading provider of portal software to Fortune 500 companies that use BroadVision to power their enterprise business portal initiatives--leveraging the web and wireless devices to unify and extend their enterprise applications, information and business processes, to collaborate with over 50 million users.