Application Servers

Oracle is the winner again in this category. IBM Web Sphere walks in second, with Sun ONE being a distant third. Novell completes the Club. Major brand-shifts have occurred in the past one year. WebSphere has gained 12 index points to consolidate its second place (held last year too). Sun ONE sees a one point loss, but it gains a place to second. Novell loses 9 index points and falls to last place. While all of Sun ONE customers want to remain with that platform, they are just 3% of those polled. They might be joined by some 5% other users from WebSphere and other platforms. Novell sees a large exodus to both WebSphere and other platforms. Brand shifts from WebSphere and Oracle are minimal with almost no one wanting to shift. 

Oracle's brand loyalty is the highest in the past 3 years, up 10 points from 2003 and 5 from last year. Similarly WebSphere sees an improvement from 74 to 89% but the loser of that battle is Novell that goes down from 76% to 54%.The past two years has seen a lot of hype and hoopla around application servers. Last year saw a partial die-down, but BEA WebLogic kept up the tempo. However, they haven't seen enough votes to get them into the Club. This space, however, is massively fragmented with a lot of niche and specialty players getting support. This is especially true in the manufacturing industry where 25% of the users are with other platforms, possibly because of non-standard and proprietary platforms.

Tomcat is yet another big player in this place.Similarly 28% of the services industry looks for these specialty providers.

Brand Shift (%) 2003

Platforms from equipment-specific and industry-specific solutions like HP's Application Server (used for voice and data web services) are included in this. Platforms like JBoss, Macromedia's JRun, Borland Application Server, and Tomcat polled roughly 42 index points together.Application Servers category is carried in both our Users' Choice as well as Developers' Choice awards. Last year, while Oracle won the category in Users' Choice by a thumping 64 index points, it lost to Win Server 2003 in the Developers' Choice by almost the same margin. So, does this indicate that while Oracle is the preferred enterprise application server deployment platform (for hosting your ERP and what-have-you) but Win 2003 — read 'ASP.NET' — is the platform of choice for developing applications?Something to note in this category is, all of this year's Club members are cross-platform. Oracle, WebSphere, Sun ONE and Novell exteNd all run under Windows, UNIX/Linux. So is the cross-platform ability something people are looking for in such products or is it an open door for a possible future (OS) platform migration?