Another possible reason for IBM's success is that its comprehensive service offering allows it to discount the software.
"If IBM wants a deal it can sell software for nothing, as it can sell 50 consultants," said Labourey.
Thomas Murphy, a vice president at META Group, said the analyst firm expects the open-source market for application servers to increase as companies realise that the both open source and proprietary servers offer comparable functionality and therefore make decisions based on price.
"The application server market has reached stabilisation point," said Murphy "When people look at application servers they are beginning to find that they are all pretty similar. If it comes to price, why not price at zero, by getting an open-source solution?"
The three main options in the open-source community are JBoss, JOnAS and Apache Geronimo, according to Murphy.
IBM's Sutor said the main problem with open source application servers, such as JBoss, are insufficient availability, scalability and interoperability.
"JBoss has nothing like the high availability and is not nearly as scalable as IBM Websphere," said Sutor. "There are also compatability issues between each of the open source offerings. If different departments use a different open source application server, can they talk to each other?"
JBoss' Labourey disagreed with Sutor's claim, stating that JBoss provided high availability and scalability through its product JBossCache. He pointed out that in August the French Ministry of Finance chose JBoss to run its mission-critical tax applications, a system which will include 200 servers.
ZDNet reported in September that the Danish Ministry of Finance used JBoss, rather than Microsoft's BizTalk, for its mission-critical data exchange application.
As for interoperability, JBoss AS 4.0 is J2EE 1.4 certified, a Sun certification which proves compatibility with the Java Enterprise specification. Much of the J2EE 1.4 standard is about compatability between different application servers, according to Labourey. In comparison, Websphere 5, is only J2EE 1.3 certified.
Apache Geronimo is also working towards J2EE certification, as is JOnAS, which announced on its Web site on Friday that a certified version is expected soon.
