The BEA acquisition by Oracle has changed the application infrastructure and middleware market, creating a stronger competitor for IBM (with a 18% vs. 29% market share). Note that Microsoft is not visible in the market share comparison because its middlewares are embedded in the OS, but it is among the leaders. When removing MQ and TP (dominated by IBM), Oracle is the potential new leader.
Massimo then spends about 10 minutes explaining what an application server is. Pretty boring…
The MQ still includes the legacy "application servers" (Tuxedo, CICS/IMS) because they are still in heavy demand. The current generation of application servers includes IBM, Oracle, Microsoft… And, more interesting, a new generation of platforms is emerging in the Visionaries quadrant. Massimo will spend time on the latter.
Salesforce represents a new delivery model: PaaS. There are already 6 or 7 other companies with this model. Their environment is proprietary, although java-like sometimes and there issues to consider before comitting to them (externalized data, SLAs...).
The other visionaries are innovative in trying to solve 2 different problems: ultra-fast processing (WareLite, Kabira…, this is what Gartner calls the "EDA application servers") and ultra-high scalability and availability on commodity boxes (called the "grid-based application servers", to be thought as Google-like elastic environments, the providers are Appistry, GigaSpaces, OpenCloud…). As a whole, these vendors are classified in the "extreme transaction processing" category by Gartner.
Many of the visionaries will die but some will certainly emerge as leaders because of the innovation they bring.
Those are technologies to watch if there is a business case (examples: trading software, telcos operations...). The same holds true for the PaaS model as well.
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