Application Servers

Oracle wins again in a market that is remaining more or less similar to what it was last year.

The big hype about application servers has died down, and application servers are now being treated as a part of the normal IT infrastructure, and not as the next best thing since brown bread.

This is the only segment that we are carrying across both the enterprise and the developer segments of the survey. Why?

Because there is still a debate over who exactly is the decision maker when it comes to application servers. Is it the enterprise, is it the development agency, or is it the consultant in between? There is anecdotal evidence to show that any one of them, or all of them together, could be the decision maker, depending on the situation at hand. So, let us see which way is it playing. This month, we have what the enterprise decision maker is saying. Next month we will carry the developer's version of the story.

Oracle made an improvement in brand loyalty, going up slightly from 82 percent last year to 88 percent this year. IBM's WebSphere also saw a minor improvement, up from 71 percent last year to 74 percent this time. Novell, on the other hand, went down in the brand-loyalty stakes from 76 percent last year to 44 percent this year. This reduction for Novell seems to work to the

advantage of Oracle and IBM. 

Similarly, there is a minor reduc-tion in SunOne's share of the market, reducing from an indexed

score of 16 last year to 10 this time. 

There is some variation in brand preference across verticals. None of the software companies opted for Novell, while in telcom, support for WebSphere was absent. 

While BEA's Weblogic did not get enough votes to make it to the Users' Choice Club, it is seeing increased acceptance, with almost twice the number of votes for future purchase as there are current installations.

2003