Banks don’t like being dependent on any one particular thing. They like to have a lot of options. Typically, we’ll roll out WebLogic, but we’ll also have JBoss on the side. Who uses Weblogic? IBM Websphere? Anybody use Websphere by choice? No hands at t’all, (Laughter from the audience) I like that one. So for the benefit of the camera half use Websphere and no one uses it by choice.
— John Davies
I sense a wave of disillusionment with IBM Websphere that threatens to end their dominance in commercial application servers. Weblogic has always had a it’s share of detractors and quite a few people get annoyed with the marketing politics of JBoss. Still you can easily find lots of developers who would admit to using either one by choice.
With the application server moving towards more of a commodity item easily dominated by open source competitors like JBoss, Glassfish or even a simple Tomcat server can Websphere sustain charging for enterprise software rates for the Webshpere platform? Not really a sustainable model, though they really make their money in professional services so maybe they’re not that concerned.
And John Davies isn’t some Web 2.0 type. He’s worked for over 20 years in ever so Enterprisey investment banking. He is CTO and co-founder of C24.