The trend toward J2EE application servers increasing becoming a commodity has prompted the emergence of what market researcher Gartner calls "application platform suites." These suites are a bundle of applications that run in conjunction with a Java application server and include specialised integration software and corporate portals, which present corporate information through a browser. IBM, BEA, Oracle, Sybase and others have built out their Java wares with these add-ons in an effort to garner more revenue from existing customers. Other add-ons include mobile and collaborative capabilities and a network directory. "It's an inevitable evolution to go from the fragmented mess that there's been for the last few years to a platform designed for all the pieces to work together," said John Magee, vice president of marketing for Oracle's Oracle9i Application Server. "It reduces the cost of development applications and maintaining them." Indeed, application suites and more capable application servers will remain in strong demand for the coming years, according to analysts. IDC, for example, is forecasting about 3 percent growth in revenue this year for the application server category. Companies such as IBM and BEA continue to count on higher-end features, such as clustering and the latest standards compliance, to attract customers. Open-source companies also have yet to show that they can provide the services required to support a large number of customers. "Open source is good at simpler technology...But when you have big chunks of changes like Web services and security and administration going on with the application server -- something that complex -- we think it will be a few years before open source catches up," said Frazier Miller, director of product strategy at BEA. Meanwhile, longtime Java foe Microsoft is also plotting to make life uncomfortable for Java server software providers. With the planned release of Windows Server 2003 at the end of April, Microsoft can claim to have its own application server embedded within the operating system. By compressing more features, such as transactional and integration software, into Windows, Microsoft is effectively giving away typical middleware features found in Java application servers with its operating system, according to Microsoft executives. "At some point, that chunk of middleware is not a market. Those companies can't make money on it anymore," said John Montgomery, group product manager for Microsoft's .Net developer platform. Building developer loyalty Microsoft also continues to wield its development tools as a competitive weapon. The productivity that programmers gain by using Microsoft's .Net development tools is usually a more important customer consideration than price, according to Microsoft executives. BEA and IBM, which control the majority of Java application server revenue, have both ratcheted up efforts to build developer loyalty. Last year, BEA created its WebLogic Workshop, a programming application designed to address the difficulty of writing applications with Java and J2EE - a long-standing complaint. IBM demonstrated its growing focus on developers last year with the launch of a Java-based open-source tools initiative called Eclipse and with its acquisition of Rational Software. Sybase, which IDC's Rosen said "is on the borderline of those players that can still make a go of it and gain market share," plans to launch a series of productivity tools for its EAServer. The tools are designed to lower the ongoing operating costs of Web applications, according to Sybase. In the long term, Gartner analyst Yafim Natis sees growing demand for application servers but a decided split in how they are developed and packaged. Basic application servers will be free or nearly free and will be included in other products, from Microsoft's operating system to SAP's R/3 enterprise application suite. More specialised application servers will also emerge, Natis predicts. He sees a need for server software whose main task is presenting database information to a variety of handheld devices, as well as for more high-end applications to handle mainly transactions and machine-to-machine data exchange. For the coming year, analysts project that the same server software companies will continue to duke it out in a persistently tight economic environment. "There are no new players - the existing companies are just competing for share of wallet now," Forrester's Schadler said. "So the battle shifts to be about completeness, the cohesion of the products, the quality of the tools, price, third-party company support and developer skills. It becomes a brand war."
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