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Strategies & Market Trends : Gorilla and King Portfolio Candidates -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Don Mosher who wrote (44876)	7/24/2001 5:12:43 PM
From: Thomas Mercer-Hursh	Respond to of 54805

Can I assume that you have done direct comparisons between BEA and iPlanet? I really have only done some spot comparisons since my primary interest in iPlanet is their Forté tools, not the Java stuff. I am very interested in incorporating a number of their service products, e.g., iDS for LDAP and some of the e-commerce stuff in particular, but am not currently interested in developing and deploying in Java per se. Not only do I find the Forté environment far more compelling, but there is that rather serious 2-3X performance issue I mentioned. But, if one simply ticks off a list of offerings, assuming that comparably labelled offerings are reasonably similar in capabilities, then iPlanet's list looks to me to be much longer and more complete. I see nothing on the BEA site that compares to that iPlanet Platform diagram with the layers and many products per layer, for example. But that standard(df) is not the same as standard(J2EE). Which one of us in confused here? Neither? Both? Everyone else? I was not trying to point to standard in the sense something officially sanctioned by a governing body, but to contrast it with "product". A product is not going to qualify for gorillaness unless it becomes regarded as a de facto standard by other vendors and consumers. I see no indication that anything BEA has provided is headed in that direction. The only standards I see in this market, de facto or otherwise, are the officially sanctioned variety and I think there is a very strong focus in this market on that kind of standard. Concerning point 2, my understanding is that some Java vendors unfortunately include some sliver of proprietary advantage in how they institute Java. You are saying, and I cannot dispute you, that Sun's iPlanet does not, and this is good. If so, I agree. Actually, I was making a somewhat broader point. Pre-J2EE, every Java appserver had proprietary extensions because base Java just wasn't enough to handle real distributed applications by a long shot. Post-J2EE my understanding is that there is a semi-religious adherence to standard and a tendency to package any extensions as clear add-on products because the customers don't want to be stuck the way they were before with no choice of deployment engine. If the market is early and small, That is my contention, particularly with respect to deployment in volume. J2EE is sufficiently new as a standard that not all vendors are even yet shipping their first full round of product. There are an awful lot of companies in this business that were the Hot Thing, seemingly destined for Big Things, which have just disappeared.