The numbers are these: IBM claims over 600 third-party software vendors and integrators have latched onto what it wants to call a bandwagon of support for WebSphere Application Server Community Edition. It attributes support of 200 third party applications, and downloads of roughly a quarter million.
That’s the product that, although it carries the familiar WebSphere brand, is a different piece of software than the WebSphere that we all know and love.
WebSphere Community Edition is the result of the May 2005 acquisition of Gluecode, whose product formed the core of the Apache Geronimo project. Gluecode’s founder, Winston Damarillo, then invested the money from the sale in building the beginnings of his open source empire, Simula Labs.
The impetus for the wave of Java open source middleware is that, while J2EE skewed development towards high-end enterprise platforms with sophisticated features like load balancing, failover, and transaction management, in raw numbers, most customers had simpler needs.
Instead of needing to pool thousands of concurrent interactions, running against multiple back end sources, many websites operate on much smaller scale and connect with one or maybe two back end databases.
The emergence of open source alternatives has also resulted from J2EE’s very complexity. Analysts, such as Burton Group analyst Richard Monson-Haefel, have pointed to the emergence of rebel frameworks as a reaction against that complexity. That’s lead to strategies, such as BEA’s blended source initiative, where the company provides support for official and unofficial Java frameworks like Spring, Hibernate, Struts, and Tiles. And it lead the Java Community Process itself to simplify Java with through Java EE 5, the successor to J2EE.
The result is that IBM’s WebSphere Community Edition is being targeted heavily at, not surprisingly, small-midsize businesses (SMBs) who would normally be WebSphere customers. It is greasing the skids with sales, marketing and technical support to business partners targeting this segment.
IBM’s strategy or targeting this market with a product separate from the mother ship is different from BEA’s, which bases its strategy on supporting multiple frameworks that utilize the same back end platform. Nevertheless, the fact that both Java leaders are pouring precious resources into such a lower price point market reflects the fact that the mainstream enterprise Java platform market has pretty much matured.
