Plumtree took the idea behind My Yahoo and brought it inside the company firewall. Office workers had to hunt across dozens of systems for the information they needed. Plumtree, founded in San Francisco, gave each employee a single web page built from small windows called portlets. Each portlet drew data from a different source. Plumtree went public in June 2002, after it cut its expected price range from $13 to $15 down to $7 to $9.

One Front Door

Plumtree bet that companies would want one front door to all their software. Its portal pulled in content from many vendors, so large organizations with mixed systems found it useful. Big customers, including government agencies, adopted it widely. The portal often became the internal home page that thousands of employees saw each morning. Co-founder Glenn Kelman later became the chief executive of Redfin.

Bought by BEA

Plumtree priced its IPO at $8.50 a share in June 2002 and listed on Nasdaq. It was one of the few software companies to go public that year, and it grew modestly as the economy recovered. Larger vendors began bundling portals with their own platforms. In 2005 BEA Systems acquired Plumtree for about $200 million and folded it into its own portal products. Oracle later bought BEA.

Cover: Plum Blossoms, Crane, and Spring, Xugu. Art Institute of Chicago, public domain. Chosen for a blossoming plum tree.