Felipe Leme's Blog

The rise and fall of the application server as product (A.K.A. app server commoditization)

• J2EE 1.2 (from http://java.sun.com/j2ee/1.2_compatibility.html):
  
  18 companies licensed 20 implementations
• J2EE 1.3 (from http://java.sun.com/j2ee/compatibility_1.3.html):
  
  21 companies licensed 29 implementations
• J2EE 1.4 (from http://java.sun.com/j2ee/compatibility_1.4.html):
  
  13 companies/organizations* licensed 13 implementations
  
  *This release had several open-source implementations delivered by non-profit organizations (such as Apache Software Foundation).
  
• JavaEE 5 (from http://java.sun.com/javaee/overview/compatibility.jsp):
  
  2 companies licensed 2 implementations

Comments

• Hi Felipe,

  The trend is not a speculation, it's a fact. Application servers are commoditized, and 3 years ago the big vendors saw it coming which is why they started focusing on other products 'up the stack' like ESBs, portal servers, etc. Those products are just starting to be attacked by open source, as you can see JBoss has invested in them recently too.

  However, don't look at the 2 licensees of Java EE 5 as a metric - it's too new and the vendors will be licensing them as soon as their implementations are done.

  Floyd Marinescu
  InfoQ.com Enterprise Software Development Community

  Posted by: fmarines on June 16, 2006 at 04:11 PM

• 
  This commoditization is certainly a true trend, but I think the current availability of open source implementations is only part of the reason and perhaps not a critical part. You point that the biggest consolidation happened in the transition of J2EE 1.3 to 1.4 (JEE 5 is still too fresh, so it's no surprise that the number of implementors is very small yet). In the 1.3 timeframe we didn't have much free/opensource options; we only had JBoss as a serious contender, and it was not mature enough to represent serious competition and as you point out, the LGPL (plus some well-publicized aggresive behaviors of JBoss.org) didn't make it a terrific option for many open source enthusiats.

  
  The fact is that 21 vendors is way too much vendors for this market, and this consolidation was mandatory by market forces even if we never had any free/OSS products. Even the 13 vendors of 1.4 are still a large number... the lion's share of the enterprise Java market is bound to be shared by a handful of vendors (IBM, BEA, Oracle, perhaps Sun, and one or two OSS products), and all other vendors will have to fight for pieces of the remaining ~5% share, which cannot feed many vendors. Unless these are smaller companies, specializing in some components that they do very well, e.g. the Web tier for Caucho, and just integrating other people's stuff for the rest of the J2EE stack, so their investment is very small.

  
  We have been there before -- remember the explosion of CORBA vendors and products, followed by the implosion of most of these products, and finally the commoditization of the basic ORB product plus most Services -- and the OSS ORBs played no role in this commoditization too.
  

  Posted by: opinali on June 19, 2006 at 04:25 PM

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