Long before Judith and Don's Hunt write-up, Thomas has consistently offered a point of view expressing reasons to be very skeptical about gorilla-like dominance in the J2EE app server space by anyone, much less by BEA Systems. Yet I haven't seen very much response, certainly not in the same sort of detail that he offers.
To provide the catalyst for what I hope will be an informative discussion, I offer quotes shown below from his posts that hopefully highlight the more important issues he has consistently brought to our forum. I invite everyone to respond in the context of Gorilla Gaming, including Paul Philp who is surely reading this and will respond either on the Fool thread or in his upcoming write-up. :)
Moving on to Thomas's coments ...
"...the ultimate Gorilla [of apps servers], 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."
"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."
"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."
"My sense of this market is that it is strongly moving toward adherence to J2EE, an open standard, but not a proprietary one and that there is a very strong interest in vendor independence. Business applications written for the proprietary features of specific appservers are becoming unacceptable because businesses may already have a different appserver in place for another application."
"Companies are not redeveloping all their applications from scratch and tossing out their client/server and mainframe apps, but rather are integrating these apps interfaced to new web applications. ... [W]e are a long, long way from a mass swap out."
"In short, if 'Coleman claims that BEA has the 70% to 80% market share', my question is 'market share of what?' ".
"It is one thing for a company to buy a limited user license for development and quite another to buy multi-thousand user licenses for deployment, especially in a standards-focused market like Java appservers where there is now a presumption that one can develop on appserver A and deploy on appserver B. Most adoptions of all of these products at this point are for development and limited deployment."
"[A true gorilla] is in control of the architecture and thus can control the direction of change. This is not something I think you can say of the J2EE era and beyond appserver since everyone is conforming to a shared standard and many companies participate in the definition of the future evolution of those standards (although Sun has a different sort of say than anyone else). One could make the argument that this means, by definition, that there can't be a gorilla of Java appservers. "
--Mike Buckley |
