Oracle yesterday launched 9i Application Server (9iAS) Java Edition, a version of its Java 2 Enterprise Edition (J2EE) product featuring application development tools.
9iAS Java Edition is available for free to ISVs who embed the product with their software and customers of BEA migrating to Oracle under a Switch and Save program, also announced yesterday. Customers also receive free services and 50% off support under Switch and Save.
Thomas Kurian, Oracle senior vice president of 9iAS development, said: We see the biggest opportunity is seeding the customer base.
However, they reserved most of the rhetoric of yesterday’s announcement for J2EE application server market leader BEA by focusing on price. BEA’s WebLogic Server starts at $10,000 per CPU, and Oracle’s chief marketing officer Mark Jarvis claimed and easy and predictable migration for BEA customers moving to Oracle.
A large percentage of WebLogic Server customers use Oracle’s database, a figure Oracle claimed is around 90%. Price, too, suggests a potential weakness for BEA, although the company insists that it competes on the quality of its implementation.
Kurian said Oracle wanted to encourage more BEA users to switch to its platform via 9iAS Java Edition. We want to accelerate the [growth] trend that’s there in the market. The more pressure we can put on BEA by taking away their core business, the better.
Oracle faces an uphill struggle against BEA, though. BEA owned 34% share of the application server market in 2001 according to Giga Information Group compared to Oracle who jostled with Sun on single-digit market share. IBM was joint first with BEA.
Oracle’s short-term battle is more likely to focus on consolidating a third-place ranking against Sun. That company last year also adopted a volume play, announcing a free version of its J2EE applications server, the Sun ONE Application Server Platform Edition, for Solaris, Linux, Hewlett Packard UX’s and IBM’s AIX.
Sun has chosen to promote the web-server functionality of its entry-level product, The company claims the ONE Application Server is at least 45% faster than BEA and IBM in web services using JAX-RPC and more than 50% faster than IBM in JSPs, Servlets and JDBC.
9iAS Java Edition, meanwhile, features J2EE 1.3 and Enterprise Java Bean (EJB) 2.0 certification, high-availability clustering, object relational mapping via TopLink, HTTP server, and a license for five seats of its JDeveloper application development tools.
Lacking are enterprise portal and content management, found in 9iAS Standard Edition priced $10,000 per processor, and security and identity management, business intelligence and wireless capabilities of Enterprise Edition, priced $20,000 per processor.
Oracle added it is working on integrating WS-Security with Enterprise Edition and may add support for federated identity with support for Liberty Alliance Protocol specification.
Source: Computerwire
