Nice job, but as you might expect from prior posts, a few counter points...
The enterprise app server market is an emergent one,
I think this is an extremely important point in two different ways. First, regardless of whether one regards current growth as qualifying for foothills of the tornado, in the tornado, or what, it is very clear that total market penetration to date is an extremely small fraction of what this market will become over time. This implies many things, not the least of which is that the ultimate Gorilla, if any, could easily be a minor or even a non-player today because a couple years of good sales could wipe out any first comer edge. We have seen this already in earlier phases of appserver growth, some of the early leaders not even existing today.
Second, I am not at all sure that we even know what the right boundaries are on the "market". Not very long ago it was enough that a company sold an appserver; today it seems necessary to add value to that appserver through facilities like distributed transaction support and development aids. It would not surprise me if a few years from now the appserver itself was a commodity item and the big play was actually in the tools to support the development and deployment of applications and the integration with existing applications.
Product offerings
I was surprised that you didn't list Tuxedo as a product. I would have guessed that was still a significant part of their business.
the definition of “middleware” has morphed with each expansion of BEA’s product line and mission.
And with the innovations coming from other vendors. When middleware meant things like Tuxedo which basically performed a single function, that of managing transactions spread across multiple systems, it seemed like fairly useful category. Product's like iPlanet's Integration Server (iIS), however, go way beyond merely connecting systems and become a part of how the overall problem is solved, including management of business flow logic.
SEBL announces it will build its e-business applications on top of WebLogic platform (June 2001)
My memory is that this announcement was that they would provide interoperability, not that they were going to suddenly re-develop their applications to run on WebLogic. Very different thing since one can provide interoperability with lots of folks. Compare this, for example, to their commitment to Actuate which is actually being used to do the reporting for Siebel and is key in their web publishing initiative.
MSFT: Microsoft’s .Net is the most dangerous potential competitor, but obviously has no present share or presence
Much noise, but not really clear what it has to do with anything in this sphere yet. People tend to be asking "will you be compatible with", not "are you built with", so it may end up being nothing more than adding some more interoperability interfaces.
Do you have any information on BEA revenues by product? In particular, I would be interested in how much still came from Tuxedo since that has been broadly accepted in the past as a standalone product, but is less likely to be a major source of future growth.
As to market share, apropos the cautions cited above about the youth of the market, I sure wouldn't want to count out iPlanet. The breadth and depth of their offering goes way beyond that of BEA and is really only approached by IBM. My expectation is that people will move from buying appservers as separate products to buying solution environments. BEA has a lot of catchup to do there. |
