why the cloud scares Oracle
It takes some effort to look below the surface and additionally look past the comedic routines of its CEO on stage, but i am sure there are more people in the industry that ask, besides me, why the purveyor of the most robust database appliance in the marketplace offers nothing towards the cloud-based movement of apps running on virtualized hardware: in other words, why is Oracle running hard from hosted infrastructure?....
Even considering security and Identity management webinars coming up, based around cloud-infrastructure and the little salesforce.com competitive hedge that Ellison is invested in: why would oracle not be in the driver's seat when it comes to offering a competitive cloud based offering around MySQL and Glassfish, along with the ESB, BPM, and tools, not to mention Amberpoint?....
That is the question i have for the roadmap determinants, when they finally release a clustering schedule for glassfish v. 3, and it is a question i have had for Sun for some time now, why is MySQL and Glassfish not reserved for scale-out deployments, when the core Fusion/Oracle DB can handle enterprise accounts?....
Is it resources, that keeping two competing application platforms within the same company would be too distracting, too costly, too cumbersome, too cannibalizing, or too threatening to the money makers of WebLogic and Oracle DB, to just build a cloud org., in the form of MySQL and Glassfish, and put to rest the roadmap questions that will come if Oracle offers anything other than full enterprise-wide, web-wide support for the Sun software assets?....
My only answer can come from the open source model of the Sun infrastructure product-lines that never had a chance in a hardware scenario, but could become true deal makers in a software sales force's hands, and that is Oracle refuses to abide by a competitive affront to their proprietary model of selling high license cost, and even higher maintenance cost products, that do not have competing organizations, whether they be channel, SI, or ISV to under-cut them on price....
They have spent a lot of money on Sun, for a dying company that was doing great things in OSS terms so they have to get their investment back, through more than just hardware margins, and that means pushing Fusion out the door with little to no impediments to competitive pricing, and honestly where does that pricing pressure come from: not from IBM and WebSphere with Global Services offerings, only Red Hat with JBoss stands in the way of WebLogic pricing, now that Glassfish is safely behind closed doors, or so it seems.....
So, I respect the Glassfish people at Oracle, and will listen to them to be patient, and wait for the roadmap, but it is pretty tough now to back-down from what was said two weeks ago with the web event to announce some details of the Glassfish and MySQL purposes within a new Oracle software organization, and wonder why Oracle continues to deride something that everyone else is planning on, in the form of cloud-scale deployments....
It takes integration of apps and data, and it takes open standards, in the form of web services, and honestly it takes Open Source Software in order for those things to happen, and i am not so convinced we are going to see an investment beyond Fusion for engineering resources to be applied to scale-out deployments, like what it would take in the form of Reference Architectures and the like in order for non-techy sales people to translate for customers....
OSS is not what Oracle likes to do, except unless it means hurting or at least attempting to hurt Red Hat's model for Enterprise Linux by doing their own fork job, and though Mike Lehmann, Thomas Kurian, and Ted Ferrell are saying that OSS will continue, can they promise or agree to definitive support for the open source communities that were built around java.net at Sun?...i dont think they can or are willing to do that, considering the immense under-taking of getting three world-class ERP systems on one app server platform, along with all of the ancillary products to accompany it, in the form of Fusion....
I wonder, and then stop to wonder why there is no cloud future for Glassfish and MySQL because honestly, that was the major threat to Oracle Fusion in the form of technology parity and pricing pressure before the merger, so what is the incentive now to continue them now that they dont have to?.....lots of questions still remain but it becomes clearer as to what Oracle will ultimately prioritize in the face of hard choices on resource allocation, that will come regardless of current promises, and irrespective of amount of money available beyond what Sun had....
The reality will be a hard lesson for anyone trusting altruism from a company specialized to turn a profit at the expense of what is best for its customers....thats not all i am saying, but it begs the question, Oracle: what is so bad about the cloud to your business?.....
"forking" Glassfish
i dont buy it, i just refuse to capitulate, and i dont have to as i am not an employee of the world's largest business software provider, and say that Glassfish is a 'departmental' application server, to be upsold to expensive WebLogic licenses, that frankly offers an inferior product to what has been built in the OSS community through the long-gone independent java.net....someone needs to explain to me the art of forking because the only company or organization that i have heard do it have been failures in the form of Apache's attempts with openJDK, and Oracle's attempt to copy Red hat's Enterprise Linux....but to me, it is time to explore the option of forking glassfish and continuing to invest in it as a platform for cloud-based, high availability, enterprise-wide and web-wide deployments, that scale beyond a developer's studio....
so, i am calling on those in the industry with the means to look at code, namely the Java developer ranks to get glassfish on to google's Code site, and begin the process of forking the OSS content that has been built over the past four years, since Glassfish's announcement and inception...there is no logical play for Glassfish within Oracle's stated product strategy with Fusion, and therefore there is a significant market opportunity to take the assets under GPL license and form a new entity that will support enterprise-wide deployments, and even build within Google's cloud offerings to make the Reference Implementation the premier app server in the marketplace....makes sense, doesnt it?....
I would say that the most natural person to do the rallying for this is Marc Fleury, himself, though i know it would be a tough sell, as this is not his code base baby, but JBoss has morphed in to something else beyond what he originally started, and perhaps his non-compete is coming up to expiration....just think of the developers he would attract worldwide, if he were to sign-on to a fork of Glassfish, and just think of the resources that could be potentially available from Google, if we were to make an app server cloud oriented, and on their Code site, its like a built-in acquisition guarantee, from the company with the deepest pockets....there is even a scenario where Google will need Glassfish to do business, as they move in to the enterprise, so with some luck and lots of execution, it could be a high, high premium paid for the work of a fork job....
I have also proposed portable applications across JEE servers, perhaps even components for vertical implementations for HIPAA, SWIFT, FMEA, and other industry standards, so the project could grow beyond just an app server platform fork, and include applications that would run on JBoss, and perhaps even WebLogic and WebSphere with some work....but the real test is in finding Glassfish a home, and getting the write-once-run-anywhere promise going with some apps that run in the cloud that can be deployed on compliant platforms from any vendor or company....forking Glassfish means taking on Oracle's stated product strategy, and it is about time someone does it, as Fusion toils along, with no word whatsoever on its delivery schedule....all they do is buy more companies to divert attention from their timelines for release, and now they have kicked the most valuable Sun asset in to the ranks of 'departmental': Fail.....
i ask you all in the industry to consider a world where JBoss is the only JEE 6 app server left for deployments, as WebLogic and WebSphere have basically not even supported JEE 5 yet, within their product-lines, so now we have a uni-tier app server market on standards, with Spring Source being the natural beneficiary of this splintering....it is time for the Java developer ranks to get paid for OSS work and not let companies like Oracle take all the work in-house and mis-market it, with a term that make me cringe: 'departmental'....
take a look around, what do you see in the marketplace other than a lot of invested companies looking for answers on what is next for JEE, and the answer had been coming from the Glassfish org., and now that org. is essentially dead, so forks dont usually work, they are seldom ever attempted, but this one is worth it, this one could introduce Google in to the enterprise and could make the developers on the project a lot of money that Oracle is leaving on the table with their positioning that basically says we will not sell Glassfish, and we will only sell WebLogic....i say to all those not satisfied with the decision, to rise up, and begin to build the ranks of those willing to fork glassfish for the industry to stay afloat of portability....it only takes some momentum to really build something unique, and only you are one of many who could make it possible, so take a look at my site, and tell me i am not on to something....
it is time to fork Glassfish:
http://code.google.com/p/astrocloud/wiki/PageName
glassfish is google's
with the acquisition of Sun complete, and Oracle set to announce their roadmap for Sun products and technologies, the one thing i will be looking for is how they justify investment in the set of products that fall under the Glassfish moniker...with WebLogic as the run-time for Fusion, and by extension the ERP apps, and nearly all the database deals that will be bundled with an application server, there is virtually no way Glassfish survives beyond the year, even as Oracle is obliged to keep MySQL alive for the low-end implementations....its a shame, but it makes sense, perhaps Oracle will take the ESB and take some of NetBeans, but there is not a chance they will risk diluting their investment in BEA, by supporting yet another app server, one that only has cache within the Java developer community, and has yet to penetrate the enterprise, even though it probably is a better product-line than WebLogic...the train has left the station, and there is no turning back on Fusion, this far in to the development process, which is already massively behind schedule....
so, what is a Glassfish user to do, other than wait for a fork?....i suggest that as it is the Reference Implementation of Java EE, it would be best served as a project at google, and by that i mean a project living within Google Code, so that an enterprise product could take root at the ad/search giant, and give them a way in to the minds of Java developers worldwide...this is why it makes sense:
- Google builds cloud apps, and Glassfish is the best cloud app server on the market...
- Java is still the base for Guice and other development efforts at Google, so getting their feet wet with enterprise Java, only further positions Google as a necessary counter-weight to .Net and Microsoft....
- Glassfish is feature complete, and would greatly benefit from the engineering resources at Google to make it more tailored toward consumer facing applications....
- Oracle and google are natural allies, aside from Ellison's public campaign against clouds, they do different things, and do not get in each other's way and they have a common enemy in complexity of IT, which only benefits IBM Global Services and Microsoft's one size-fits-all mentality....
- Google needs an enterprise story, and building a middleware stack from the bottom-up would take too long, and would not be accepted within the marketplace for some time, too long to stay pace with .Net....
so, Oracle should de-emphasize the investment in Glassfish, as they are determined to shake resources out of Sun and make it profitable, and give the code direction to Google to make a viable enterprise platform for the legions of developers that are now circling around Guice, Android, and Chrome, all while giving enterprise Java a needed shot in the arm following the delays of JBoss 6 and the insurgency of SpringSource to fragment component portability....
this would not necessarily be a future threat to Fusion, and would continue to give Oracle some room to bounce ideas off of a well-financed engineering team without the necessary investment in in-house resources....the product managers and engineering talent could easily transfer from Oracle to Google, as they are down the highway from each other, and would give google a lot of talent to work on their enterprise strategy all while supporting open source development, as they have been doing....
this would be a welcome transfer by Red Hat and IBM's calculation, as they do not see Google in their accounts, and Glassfish would merely be tuned to be a fine reference implementation, with future development as the base of all of Google's enterprise development to reach the Java customer base, that is looking for guidance on whether their decade-long investment in enterprise Java is worth continuing....portability would be all but guaranteed with WebSphere, WebLogic, JBoss, and Glassfish all surviving the consolidation of IT, with only an acquisition of Red hat by IBM being absent to provide a true triumvirate to compete with Microsoft via Google, IBM, and Oracle....
sooner rather than later, Google needs to get serious about its intentions within the enterprise, and Glassfish is a natural fit, as an open source platform, that is well ahead on standards and specification compliance, they could continue this leadership while building a number of projects around Glassfish that would help them better compete with Microsoft in accounts that need the enterprise capabilities...
it is likely that Oracle will pledge support for Glassfish, while at the same time beginning the process of de-emphasizing investment in its ongoing development, whether that be engineering or marketing or both...Google could bring a bridge from the past development to the future of enterprise Java, and not necessarily segment SpringSource out of the equation, as Spring runs on Glassfish, all the pieces are in place, just need to get it done....
JBoss and SpringSource
Both are owned by corporate parents that have large market shares in their respective product categories: Linux servers for Red Hat, and corporate data center virtualization for VMWare, respectively, which allows the two subsidiaries of the parents to exert some sort of free-wheeling and experimentation with messaging, such as JBoss' new non-Java EE push through other languages, and SpringSource's anti-Java EE push through their own language, of sorts....but make no mistake about the competition, it boils down to a heavily intensive fight for the mindshare of Java developers worldwide, with the eventual victor controlling what is left of the corporate IT spend that does not go to Microsoft, IBM, and Oracle...this is major terrain for the once-small start-ups to undertake....
JBoss appears to have the lead, since they held the initiative for so long, as the only open source application server vendor, that bled BEA Systems to death, and in to the arms of Oracle, all while advancing its reputation and influence within the Java community, via the JCP standardization process....but SpringSource has fought admirably, although their tactics have been suspect, in terms of deriding enterprise Java, basically on the whole, even as they adopt some of the specifications that comprise it....i find their most recent anti-application server vendor strategy around suggesting that OSGi is not ready for the enterprise to be interesting, to say the least, as Glassfish and JBoss played catch-up to delivering a micro-kernel architecture, right at the moment that they finally caught up, Spring Source pulled the rug out from underneath Glassfish, and JBoss, in particular, by saying that they are no longer interested in their customers deploying through OSGi, leaving fear, uncertainly and doubt in the minds of developers and particularly IT managers, over whether OSGi is in fact a "risky" proposition to deploy to....
JBoss has been successful with its version 5 release to coincide with JEE 5, even though it came more than a year after the specification was released, it was in keeping with its parent company's reputation of only putting out supported products that have been battle-tested and offering assurances that there would be no surprises in developing with and deploying to a Red Hat product, JBoss included....and they will do the same with JEE 6, allowing Glassfish to attract the bulk of the early adopter users, that have little influence in the decision-making process of corporate IT spend, all while developing iterations of JEE 6 to keep their foot in the game....enterprise Java needs JBoss, but JBoss is giving the message that they can manage without the latest and greatest enterprise Java for the time-being....
Spring Source is different, altogether, basically wrapping enterprise Java with proprietary extensions that they claim offer greater productivity for developers with higher assurances of reliability for IT managers, they did not even participate in the JEE 6 discussion, choosing to make their apathy to enterprise Java felt most strongly through a policy of not even voting their vote within the JCP....in one respect this is baffling, though when you are running a political operation of mindshare battles, it is not surprising, as Spring source essentially has nothing to gain from the ongoing development of a community standard that truly only benefits JBoss and perhaps Glassfish, with the latter's future still in question, considering the Oracle Fusion investment....Spring Source is better off with a fragmented community, as they are best-of-breed, apparently....
What comes next is anything but detente, as JBoss and Spring Source battle over everything from XML to integration to tools to eventually virtualization, itself....its a healthy competition, and i think the lasting impact of the EJB 2x debate is finally wearing off, as Spring Source cant say EJB is dead, as v. 3 makes clear, and EJB 3.1 takes even further with CDI, but dont count SpringSource out quite yet....this OSGi argument strikes a blow to Glassfish as they spent the past two years getting organized for it, and Spring Source is spreading successful FUD that it is not the right approach...JBoss will have to respond with assurances in v. 6 that it is enterprise ready, and can be trusted on Red Hat deployments, as VMWare certainly will carry Spring Source deep in to Linux accounts, it is going to be good....
Oracle will have to clear-up what they intend to do with Glassfish, as a stand-alone product-line, that is truly not in line with Fusion or ERP apps, and JBoss will have to respond with more than just JEE 6 marketing, and their tried-and-true open source heritage, they will have to become more of an enterprise vendor, and that may mean selling out to IBM's Global Services to get the coverage to go deeper in to accounts, as i have said....but this competition has clearly been healthy for enterprise Java, even if Spring Source turns their nose at the community...its JBoss' move with v. 6, and Spring Source will be waiting to play the antagonist of all the little holes that may add-up to a barrier to entry for JBoss in to the core of the enterprise accounts at Red Hat....
Only time will tell, but i think that this battle only makes things better for developers, more choices rather than .Net, and more innovation around Java, it will be a tough test for JBoss, but one that they can handle if execution is flawless, otherwise, look for Spring Source to drive a wedge between perceived and real advantages of JEE 6...sooner, rather than later, portability of applications will have to be demonstrated in order to counter the proprietary models, and that has not happened, Java Verified, notwithstanding....components on-the-fly, inter-operable between Glassfish and JBoss is the only way JEE 6 stares down the long-term threat that is Spring Source....
the legacy of marc fleury
marcf is the founder of JBoss, an enterprise software company that i competed with, in my time on Sun's app server, and though they whipped us for a variety of reasons, the competition has heated back-up, with Glassfish v. 3 and JBoss 6, though both Marc and myself are long gone from our respective positions....the major difference being i sold my remaining sun stock options for something like <$20K, while Marc cashed in his majority stake in JBoss, via the acquisition by red hat, but he's still around doing something cool with remote control software to make it compatible across devices, and i still write about what i see in the enterprise software industry....
one thing is for sure, the marketplace would be by magnitudes different, had JBoss not punctured a hole at the right time in the WebLogic/WebSphere duopoly that has once again made middleware industry-standards based and cheaper and more important to overall market share of IT vendors...even VMWare bought a middleware company in Spring Source, in order to provide themselves with some diversification and a growth model beyond virtualization, that is becoming heavily saturated with no real top-line growth prospects beyond organic adoption....virtualization is important but not a market category in itself, as Red hat takes the life out of the value proposition by building it in to the operating system.....
Marc and JBoss went bigger, they went after the entire Java developer community as well as deployments with enterprises, alike, and succeeded where others like Bluestone failed, simply because they were crazy good business operators on a new model of open source, and too little can be said of what JBoss' overall execution meant to the acquisition plans of Oracle, as they forced BEA in to their lap, while simultaneously providing Red hat with cover to not be acquired by oracle, and so the dance goes on with Oracle doing their best to ignore the one hole in their arsenal for enterprise software, which is a viable operating system, even considering the state of openSolaris....i have argued for IBM to acquire Red Hat, which would be interesting enough to cause a major rip tide through IT, at a lot of levels, but none of this is possible without JBoss....
i am curious as to when, how, or perhaps whether Marc will get back in to enterprise software where he honed his antagonistic skills to the maximum to provide cover to a small ATL-based start-up, outside of the valley's VC reach for so long, all while competing with IBM, BEA, Oracle, and Sun, he just has to come back someday, even if the openRemote thing blows up, there is too much at stake in the middleware wars for him to not be a part of it sometime down the road...in the course of our respective careers, we will see a Google enterprise offering on the cloud competing with Microsoft's .Net cloud offering, and hopefully Oracle and IBM are still around to talk in the same room as the new giant and the incumbent who are at war over everything...i could never see Marc take a job at one of the major companies, but there is so much innovation going on in the cloud, that somewhere he must find a niche, and build another rock-solid company....
i met him once at Java One, though he wouldnt remember, as it was 2003, and i was a lowly staffer on the floor of the show, while he was the CEO of the upstart....but cordial enough, i have written extensively over the years of why Glassfish and Sun, in general owed JBoss such a debt of being able to follow a proven model that got them back in the middleware market, and for now have fended off proprietary extensions to the core enterprise java platform, which is all that matters right now for Oracle to be competitive with WebSphere Global Services accounts, these are huge stakes....
JBoss is at a cross-roads due to its role with Red Hat, and fighting off Spring Source has been time consuming, and less lucrative than initially projected with the acquisition, but Red Hat would be nowhere without JBoss, and JBoss would not exist and have thrived without Marc Fleury, sure it sounds like an epitath, but really its just a call-to-arms for him and his supporters in the industry to begin the brainstorming sessions again that led to JBoss, in the first place, i have laid out somewhat where i think that is going with Astro Cloud, but with middleware margins becoming ever more tied to the larger platforms they sustain, surely a couple of young start-ups could shake things up again....
if i was a betting man, i would be placing some money on Marc's next move if it does come in the enterprise software realm, and i would not be alone: he entered the market at the right time, and exited gracefully with a retirement plan that allows him to dabble and think big, that is a dangerous man for anyone who thinks that the world belongs solely to the big IT vendors, i am sure that someday start-ups will move from social networking to middleware cloud opportunities, and because of what he did with JBoss, and beyond, Marc Fleury should be considered a major possibility for version 2.0 of his model of upending the software industry...
i hope i am around to see it happen.....
google code
For those in the Java industry, there are countless ways of exploring the ecosystem that nourishes developers to build the platforms and applications that counter the immense weight of Microsoft and other pseudo-proprietary solutions, and though some (not me) fret about the counter-weight of Google's influence on the community, Google Code (GC) is the best site for learning about next-gen products and tools for extending the immense success of Enterprise Java....
It all starts with open source and open participation in ideas that rely on individual contributions to a started project, which means that anyone can search the GC database, and find a wealth of solutions that may not be ready for mainstream, but are well on their way to being included in the discussion of whether Java vendors need to add additional functionality to their products based on the support a project receives on GC, along with its corresponding usefulness in real-world implementations....
i have only begun to survey the cusp of what is available, as Google started GC some time back to support their programmatic contribution to Java in the form of Guice....but from what i can see and what i have learned in the time that i have been using GC, it seems a natural location for project owners that are looking to build mind-share around an idea and gather the necessary support to turn a project in to a product....
some time back, i initiated a project around an idea i call 'astro cloud' which is basically laid out in a previous post on this blog, in the form of a brainstorming session with myself, of how existing enterprise applications could be extended to bring in the value of the cloud computing phenomenon...some, like Ellison, dont like clouds as a distinct product category, but it seems to me that the sheer weight of what Amazon EC2 and Google are doing, along with countless well-funded start-ups in the Valley and beyond, plus the economics of deploying apps to a distributed platform, here-fore known as the cloud, will make application development and deployment more efficient and simply better by getting them on platforms that scale without limit...
GC is a natural place for me to start such an idea as it costs nothing, and takes advantage of the version control and distribution capabilities of Google's developer offerings, and though i dont know the first thing about developing in Java, despite having been a product marketing manager on Sun's application server for four important years of its existence, i know there are literally thousands of Java developers using GC to do more in their spare time outside or perhaps even inside the office, to build extensions or occasional stand-alone functionality that is not in the R&D budgets of the major Java vendors....
it doesnt mean you have to turn-over intellectual property rights to Google, as far as i can tell, and it allows me to keep all of my established Google data in place, while building something that could become a Java business....i will not succeed or even start without the support of developers who share the same belief in open source development, or share the same strategic conclusions of what is needed to push enterprise java forward beyond what the application server vendor and customers do....because as we know there is a limit to what Oracle, Glassfish, JBoss, JoNas, WebSphere, Apache, and even SpringSource can do in house....
It seems to me that Google is building platforms with consumer-facing applications, and allowing their enterprise efforts to revolve around developer tools that help push AdWords as embedded functionality, and so it may be that the great Mt. View power comes in to the space of cloud apps for the enterprise in-time, i am betting that they will limit their exposure to cannibalizing what is being built on GC by individual and team development efforts, so they dont run in to a Great Plains-like scenario where all new development stops because the keeper of the platform owns the apps, as well....
In a former lifetime, as an employee of Sun, I pushed the concept of portable EJB components, that never materialized, to my surprise, but it basically was a mistake by most in the Java industry, as the whole cross-platform promise was premised on the supposed capability to plug one EJB in to any platform, and now that that vision is getting increasing viability with the JEE6 release, as component development matures, and as application spending continues to grow vis-a-vis spending on platforms, that are being dramatically reduced in cost thanks to the open source efforts of JBoss and Glassfish, it seems time for developers to begin to use their hard-won talents and market advantages to building stand-alone apps that can be portable across any Java platform....
GC is a place that i will continue to monitor for new projects that may share my belief in betting on apps or even components that can add functionality to an enterprise's IT environment, without major re-work on extensibility or integration...at the moment i am following JoNas, Multi-Verse, and some other cloud tools that seem to be good starts to the initiative to extending Java beyond the borders of the app servers, and give developers an opportunity to do something on their own, that may in fact turn in to a career, or even a company....nothing seems to be able to match the scale of Google, and combining the usability of GC with a Java application idea, could push the marketability of open source efforts at competing with existing solutions....
i am sure many of you in the Java marketplace have inspected GC at a cursory level, so i am treading on well-known territory for a lot of the Java development community, but it goes to say that by mixing and matching initiatives and functionality in a community environment, such as that found on
GC, will provide the necessary foundation to move beyond merely iterative releases of platforms, and focus the corporate Java spend on apps, which is what was promised by Enterprise Java at its inception....SpringSource was right, too much focus on just the platforms, and its time to turn control over to the developers in businesses and individuals developing on their own for real innovation to happen....i think Google Code is one of the leading contenders to lead this evolution.....
IBM JBoss WebSphere
With the release of Glassfish v.3 on top of JEE6, Oracle is back in the driver's seat with Java....they have overtaken Red Hat as the core community behind developing ease of use features for developers, customers, and ISVs, so that the ecosystem of JEE will naturally find more benefits in working with Oracle to port to both WebLogic and Glassfish, something that JBoss simply cannot offer, nor can SpringSource, nor can SAP, and especially not IBM, even though they offer Geronimo....
Geronimo is a failure, it has no traction in the marketplace, and IBM appears reticent or incapable of porting the entire suite of WebSphere product family to Geronimo, thus preventing them from being a major player in Java opportunities where Global Services does not have a strangle hold on the account...thus, its time to consolidate more and sell out Red Hat to IBM...its the next logical step and more sense than an IBM-SAP merger as JBoss is still going strong, and IBM would be able to go to customers, ISVs, and developers and give them one tool or one set of products that run on both WebSphere and JBoss natively, with better support for broader application server platforms.....
This leaves a three-tier marketplace lining up against Microsoft via Oracle, IBM, and SAP, with the possible emergence of Google in to the enterprise space, supporting the write-once-run-anywhere value proposition that is the ONLY way you beat Microsoft....no single company can do it in an account that is weighing Java v. .Net, it needs to be the entire community involved from preventing the entire enterprise space going to .Net over time....nothing Guice, Intel, or Java vendors can do on their own to prevent .Net from just getting perfected with Great Plains programming, and so it is time for IBM to step up to the plate, fork over a couple billion and buy Red Hat....
They need to get fully verified as a true Java vendor, even if it is controlled initially by Oracle, their arch-enemy, they need to see the bigger picture and secure more accounts for Global Services, while getting the only real Linux platform on the market....eventually Oracle will need to develop a true open source Linux community rather than just copying Red Hat, but until that time Solaris, Ubuntu, etc....just are not capable of competing with Red Hat, even considering Oracle's reach...its JEE6 on Linux all the way to the final confrontation with Microsoft which will happen over the coming decade....first, though, IBM and Red Hat need to respond to the overwhelming come-from-behind victory of Glassfish....
In no way should Sun's hardware be $7B valuable, and considering the margins are coming down for Oracle, it has to come from somewhere, and considering the MySQL hang-up in Europe, there has to be some reason why Oracle sticks it out with Sun, and the answer is Glassfish, all respect and responsibility to the WebLogic/Fusion staff as they have an ERP job to do, but in the Java space, its Glassfish all day every day....they have perfected the application server while welcoming Spring in to the fold, no other company or rather community could have done it but Sun's Glassfish community, and they did it....
Ease of development, ease of use, ease of support, and an ecosystem as an alternative to JBoss, it is simply the most successful application server of the past 3 years, and is probably best assumed to be the leading candidate for dominance and potential Google use in their wiggle in to the enterprise space....sure, they'll build their own application server, and work with Spring, and customize for Chrome, but Glassfish still intrigues, and Oracle has it, its now in a home that is not going away anytime soon, and thus generates customer assurances that can be backed up by the Oracle Database cash cow and maintenance revenue....
Glassfish is here to stay, JBoss is here to stay, WebSphere is here to stay, and WebLogic is here to stay, now what in that equation do you think stands-out as the next logical move in the industry....if i had money to burn on stock, it would be in Red Hat, because IBM needs to pay that premium and get the next best set of assets in-house, there is no second-place worthy of consideration, even, again, SAP, it is Linux JBoss, and that will give them wide-ranging room in enterprise accounts against Microsoft...
IBM v. Oracle with joint progress on JEE, thats a battle we have been waiting for for too long, it is time to get it on, and see what shakes out of that healthy competition....let Google get bogged down in a Microsoft war for the time being, while Java lives free as the development platform of choice for the enterprise.....
lots of money, there.....
