We don’t see that happening, said Jim Rivera, senior principal technologist for the San Jose, California-based software firm. Open source application server vendor JBoss is posing a growing threat to the established commercial players, such as BEA and IBM Corp, but Rivera argued that there are too many players in the open source middleware market to make a significant impact.
The question is not so much about commoditization as it is about consolidation, Rivera said, arguing that with three Java-based middleware projects in JBoss, JOnAS and Apache Geronimo the market is already overloaded. Even within open source we’re going to have to see consolidation.
Like other competitors such as IBM and Oracle Corp BEA is certainly not anti-open source. The company has been a strong supporter of Linux and has contributed technology to the open source community – such as the Apache XMLbeans project.
BEA is involved with open source and we feel it is critical to the Java community and IT as a whole. We’re seeing with open source it is becoming a very good tool for driving interoperability and standards, said Rivera.
There’s other aspects of open source that compete with BEA, such as JBoss, Apache Geronimo and JOnAS, he continued. The question is can it get enough market share to begin competing with commercial alternatives? Not in the foreseeable future, he added.
There is already evidence that open source software is starting to impact commercial vendors, however. In response to open source being popular in development you are seeing vendors allowing their products to be used in development for free, and BEA is in that group, admitted Rivera, although he maintained that there is a big jump to be made between development and production deployment.
This article is based on material originally published by ComputerWire
