ubuntu
O.k., i know next to nothing beyond what i can assemble in my brain and reports from el Reg about Ubuntu, but this is quite the article:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/07/23/ubuntu_springframework_glassfish/I have one exasperated response to Jonathan: oh, brother...
You can fool some of the people some of the time, but you can't fool everyone all of the time. There is absolutely zero chance of Ubuntu having a relevant competitive position vis-a-vis Red Hat, and any effort to make it look otherwise is just a reprise of openSolaris, further denting the opportunity to bring Sun back to life. Is anyone sick of me, yet?
Now, the efforts by the Glassfish representatives to get it embedded in the Ubuntu distribution are noteworthy, and welcome, and supportable. The effort to shore up the Sun hardware business with an agreement with Canonical are simply brain-dead, and leave me feeling that the end is in fact near. I honestly can't believe it.
It was a mere 8 years ago this summer, when Sun was making $5B/quarter and leaving the entire enterprise IT marketplace in its wake; now, by focusing on Ubuntu rather than Red Hat, it is nearing an end-game scenario. Canonical should probably go with SpringSource anyway, why not...it would provide a more developer oriented stack, as Glassfish is a deployment platform, first, for converting Sun's WebLogic base...Spring (apologies to everyone in Glassfish-land) is a more convenient move for Ubuntu...
Ubuntu for Sun is the definition of an amateur move, based on amateur analysis, for an amateur CEO. Again, I support getting Glassfish in as many places as possible, but if the writing between the lines can be read, Jonathan thinks that Ubuntu can provide a viable Linux distro. to compete with Red Hat. He is flat wrong. There is no way Canonical, barring an absolute break-down in execution from Raleigh (outside of JBoss), will ever be a mission-critical alternative to Red Hat; sure deploy it on some blades, make it look good for 'cloud' computing, sell MySQL on it, count developer-uptake, and standardize Sun's services business on it - - it still leads to a barely visible 2nd place, in a game of winner-take-all. Has anyone at Sun ever heard of Windows Server?
There are alternatives to Microsoft winning over the corporate IT market, and its name is Red Hat Enterprise Linux, does it take something other than Santa Clara Market Requirement Documents to get this point through to the executive management team at Sun. Scott, if you ever stumble across this blog, my apologies, as i have given my mea culpa for other inflammatory posts in the past, but your "hand-picked" successor is making decisions that fit in to a narrow criteria window which is not supported by market facts. And since a languishing-cum-buried stock price, and ongoing financial and server shipment disappointments do nothing to wake him up, perhaps you are the last thing that stands in the way of a complete collapse of the company.
Ubuntu is not even on the radar of corporate IT, it may be used by a wide swathe of developers, and maybe Jonathan believes his own hyped theories that developers determine IT purchases, but in this case, and for the foreseeable futue, customer investment will be in Red Hat. Not having a comprehensive agreement in place only guarantees further splintering of the market to Microsoft's advantage. Red Hat will continue along nicely (at least, until someone on Wall St. figures something out about JBoss 5), and will sell the hell out of Linux. What will Sun sell? Glassfish/MySQL subscriptions on 1U and 2U servers; well, that out to make them about $250M/quarter - - where is the remaining $2.75B going to come from quarter-to-quarter?
I recognize that i have pounded this issue to death, kicked it while it is down, and whatever. But it is time for someone to step in, and if Jonathan says word 1 about Ubuntu being a viable alternative for Sun in the 8/1/8 call, the machinations of a coup should begin.
Disclaimer: I am a huge proponent of Sun Microsystems, as i have stated in previous posts. And i apologize for being so inflammatory in this string of posts. But I feel that there is only 10% payback, and 90% analysis going in to them. I might be somewhat skewed in this perspective, but i do wish that Jonathan would stop playing political games with a Fortune 500 company, and actually make decisions based on market intelligence, not hunches he feels will be better for his blog arguments. back to the post...
Ubuntu v. Red Hat. It is not a comparison, and maybe after getting hammered for 8 years, as Jonathan has in his time in executive management, you start to actually believe that Sun is truly only a tier-2 vendor, and so can legitimately suspend aspirations for market leadership in the name of shoot-the-moon strategies, like what choosing Ubuntu over Red Hat would be. But to anyone who believes that Sun is still a tier-1 vendor, that has been mis-managed, this potential decision would be cataclysmic.
Again, Glassfish everywhere, i support, but as i stated in my '
Application Server Market' post earlier, you have to choose your strengths. Ubuntu is an irrelevant strength for Sun Microsystems...
x64 v. SPARC
There is little question remaining about my sentiments concerning Sun's hardware business: it is fundamentally broken...the Solaris mind-set has set-back the company by at least 5 years, and probably longer considering the decision to re-kindle Sun's OS on x64 in late '02, so what are we to think about the possibility of management re-thinking that decision and finally giving up on Solaris as a multi-functional, volume server OS? Well, we'll have to wait for the tedium of 8.1.8 in less than 2 weeks, but it is probably safe to assume that Jonathan, Lehman, Fowler, and whoever else is allowed to talk will dodge the very issue that is sidelining the one-time-champion of choice, leadership, and forward-looking innovation...
Let's be crystal clear, there is really no way Sun can buy Red Hat, and truly only IBM could take a run at it, though because of JBoss, it would be a waste of money, considering the considerable investment that Global Services has made in WebSphere...Red Hat, whether Wall St. can admit it ot not, is making too much money on too high of margins, with too much room to grow, for anyone to swallow them, good job to the original RHAT management, and the ongoing development of the Linux market that created a viable tier-1 vendor...
So, can Sun honestly bet their business on somebody else's software, which is what i have proposed in ditching Solaris in favor of Red Hat's Linux program? The easy answer is that they can no longer afford not to, but it is a little more complex for Sun management to make this historical decision, as they have bet their company on their own OS for so long, even in the face of all available evidence to the contrary, Jonathan and team have made marketing Solaris their raison d'etre...Without calling for their jobs because of this mis-step and calculated mistake, Sun needs to evaluate what their agreement with Red Hat should look like...
There are pride issues at stake, and for this crew of executives, that is not insignificant, but truly, i only see easy decisions that need to be made...the bottom-line is that x64 is not where Sun's business is at, it is all in multi-core or bust, and this is where Linux needs to be deployed to give it a competitive advantage as a hardware company that invests in software (today)...the basic constructs of an agreement is 2-fold: Fedora and openJDK...the rest is just packaging and inter-operability...
Fedora, as u know, is Red Hat's community for developing next-gen Linux, and Sun needs to get on board through a formalized agreement to share revenues and development costs on all Linux deployments on Sun servers...this is straight-forward, and would be welcomed by Red Hat, the only serious impediment to this agreement is the apparent egos of the Sun management team around openSolaris...the 2nd aspect is around openJDK, which is basically already in place, though Red Hat does something similar in IcedTea, or whatever their open-source JDK is...this is a crucial development that benefits both companies but also provides needed cover for Sun in their ongoing disagreement with Apache, and may even be the model for a coming-to-terms with Apache on their own OSS Java...
This will enable full portability of apps and components between JBoss and Glassfish, a not-so-insignificant development as they jointly carry the OSS Enterprise Java banner, and compete with Spring and .Net, beyond anything that WebLogic and WebSphere are doing...there hasn't been much in the way of portability and inter-operability outside of the excellent Application Verification Kit (AVK) that has been promoted with little fan-fare...it probably needs a boost at the executive level, which would re-juvenate the value proposition of Enterprise Java vis-a-vis .Net and Spring...but enough on JEE, it is fine, it is holding steady despite the onslaught from Microsoft and SpringSource, and it is here for the long-haul...
What Sun needs more than a middleware standard to sell servers is Linux, and only Red Hat can provide the necessary scope that will make a difference...all the efforts with Canonical are a distraction at best, and devious at worst, with no real benefit to Sun's business; really there is nothing about Ubuntu other than experience on Linux that helps Sun, it does not make them any money, or position them as an "alternative" to Red Hat, that train has left, its over, Red Hat's Linux won...
So, what would a Linux-based Sun server allow? It would eliminate the prejudices of Sun's sales force, and would open up a market for Sun servers by a factor of at least 10x....i would estimate that Solaris is about 10% of Linux's marketshare for new deployments, and i would be willing to bet that is generous to Solaris...In addition, to giving Sun sales more opportunities, it would re-orient the competitive positioning for both companies, to get Windows off the server market...it would position Sun differently than Dell, HP, and IBM as it would make them the biggest supporter of Linux, their natural place in the marketplace as a disrupter...
What to make of the Sun x64 server business? well, it is essentially non-existent, so if Jonathan comes out with any preliminary agreement on Linux hand-holding for the x64 servers, just ignore, and sell the stock...it only gets interesting and potentially game-changing for Sun's fortunes with a multi-core agreement on the T2 servers, and looking-out, on Rock...If you are watching Sun's business, or just casually referencing Ashlee's posts, or reading my blog over the past couple of weeks, u will notice an undeniable pattern of myopic neglect that requires the removal of all rational logic to believe that Solaris servers will grow Sun's marketshare, revenues, and stockprice: it is not going to happen...
Is there any other datapoint needed to sign the all encompassing agreement with Red Hat? Not really, that is all that matters right now...Glassfish and MySQL have run their course at present for available growth in the current construct, and though i would like to see Jonathan do something more with the sales organization, the only thing he can honestly do to affect Sun's business plan is to issue the mea culpa to organizations and developers that supposedly bet their busines on openSolaris, and advise them to get behind Fedora...
The x64 business is selling servers at $1,200/box v. $18K/box for SPARC T2 multi-core systems, u do the math on where the investment should be...all things being equal, like Red Hat wanting to stick it to PTB, which i think is perfectly unlikely considering their volume business plan, as well as their need to get in the high-end, the only thing holding back a deal is pride, not a good business argument...whoever, if anyone does, has influence over Sun's management, it is time to get this deal done, i mean the lawyers have 10 days, get to it, and make the 8/1/8 call a little more palatable...and the future of Sun more assured...
prepping 4 8/1/8
Yes, i saw the pre-announcement a few days ago, and yes, i am only slightly concerned that www.sun.com seems to be down right now...i guess, Jonathan and Lehman made back the $500M in market cap. they lost the day before, but the stagnant revenues do nothing for me - - no surprise, eh?...
It is simply shocking that the bravado that has been on display ever since the young CEO took over continues for another quarter of the same stupid logic: 'it's the economy, really...' Blaming the U.S. financial services industry does not seem to be a tactic that any of its competitors are using, even while PTB argues that Sun is less exposed to Wall St. customers due to the "open" campaign being waged across the entire product-line...
Its non-stop, round-the-clock insanity in Santa Clara, and if they dare to come out on August 1, and claim that nothing needs to change except for lay-offs, then the analyst crowd that has not been able to halt a run on the stock should at least ask some hard questions, including:
a. In the face of the entire server industry standardizing on Linux, why do you devote a dis-proportionate share of resources on openSolaris?
b. What exactly is Sun's sales strategy?
c. What partners can you name that would argue for Sun's ongoing independence as a stand-alone IT company?
d. What if the financial "crisis" gets worse - - what are your mitigation plans?
e. What are the alternatives for another fiscal year of disappointing results - - will you consider a merger, acquisition, divestiture, or investment to off-set the rapidly shrinking set of options available to management?
Seriously, not one of those is without merit, and yet, the questions will be utterly complex babble about geographical penetration, with answers that no longer just border on the absurd, such as the download numbers of MySQL. Jonathan, if you have the guts to read this post, which you should as a stop-gap measure to be prepared for a possible onslaught on the 8/1/8 call, understand that i basically wish you well.
As many Sun alums have argued before me, it is important for Java, for the installed base, and for the resumes of the former employees that there is a light at the end of the tunnel. However, your ongoing arguments for patience look increasingling like tunnel vision, with no end in sight for the Solaris-only business plan.
It is time to cut it loose to legacy customers to do the investment they want to customize the OS according to their needs, and for Sun to join forces with Red Hat. This would not only give you a lifeline, but forever align JBoss and Glassfish on the monumental challenge of supplanting .Net as the preferred development environment via Enterprise Java...
I have railed against the Board and the institutional investors who listened to Scott, and gave you a long leash as you presented your own strategy, but you need to end the myopia and take counsel from someone other than Greg P., Gosling, Fowler, and Green...you need middleware experts around u, like when u were one-time friends with Mark H...
I don't know the story, but his demotion was orchestrated for political reasons, and his re-emergence is a welcome sign that you don't play that game for its own sake...make the move and appoint him to a position that actually has corporate-wide influence beyond press release statements...
in the end, you have a long career in front of u, even poly-millioinaires need something to do with their work-week, and u will never run another company, start-up or Fortune 500, if you do not change course a.s.a.p. There is nothing more to say:
- kill Solaris-only hardware
- prioritize Glassfish
- put MySQL on the price books as a solution for Oracle DB replacements
until u do those 3 steps, nothing will change, and they cannot be cursory, surface-level moves, they need to be mandates, thats what only a CEO can do, if that is not done, u should lose your job...
death spiral = needed solutions
It hurts to read the latest diatribe from Ashlee Vance today in the Register:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/07/10/sun_under_gun/After some 8 years of taking the hits after the dot-bomb implosion, the rise of Red Hat/JBoss, the demise of AMD server chips, the scrutiny over strategic investments in proof-of-concept implementations with Fortune 2000 customers and organizations, and the elimination of Reference Architectures in favor of so-called 'solution selling' within GSO, Sun has had a worse decade than both George W. and al Qaeda...
This is not to say that the death knell need be sounded, as Ashlee proposes as an alternative to the madness that is quarterly reports of disappointment...Fujitsu would not do the things that are needed to right-the-ship, and would merely hide the problems ever longer...I have made myself something of a pariah within the company, for reasons that are merely referenceable below in this blog, but i will offer a few suggestions that are needed to avoid a myopic move toward irrelevance:
a. Phase-out Solaris
Nothing says Sun Microsystems like its archetypal OS, but nothing says a fringe offering than any hardware that is available with Solaris-only. The first step in this move is to recognize the problems that Red Hat is having with JBoss, and realize that a licensing agreement on support, maintenance, and R&D is in both companies' best interests: there is nothing that says Red Hat need be a competitor to the death, as Oracle has declared; Sun will come out of the mess with hardware revenues to support the ongoing development of the OSS business in middleware, and a head-head battle with Linux is quite simply killing Sun.
The initial steps in this process are already in place, but more can be done, even if Sun management wants to save face with openSolaris, by keeping it going for maintaining legacy installations, this actually makes a lot of sense; further independent R&D internally on Solaris is a waste of shareholder money, corporate goodwill, and is a strategic opportunity cost that costs the more relevant middleware offerings of Glassfish and MySQL.
b. Productize all OSS projects
openESB, openSSO, and openPortal in the form of 'WebSynergy' are all well on their way, but they are nowhere near where Glassfish, and MySQL are at, mainly because of perception and lack of sales resources dedicated to these solutions. Ultimately, there is no point in continuing to invest in software if there is no corresponding initiative to implement them on the price-list beyond support contracts, even if that is the pre-dominant sales model for Sun OSS...
What needs to be done is to create a Software sales group that isolates the functionality of these products, it would remedy the mis-step when Software was relegated to add-ons to Solaris in the sales process beginning in '02; i think Jonathan was right to think that the iPlanet/Sun ONE stuff needed to be institutionalized in order to gain the acceptance of the hardware sales force, and that its integration in to Sun-proper was a necessary first step. But in the meantime, the Systems Engineers specialists on software have taken a back-seat to account holders, who have very little software domain experience outside of claiming that "Solaris scales"...
It is time for the mindset of the Sun-Netscape Alliance to be returned where specialists in the field did the competitive positioning on middleware, and the hardware account specialists focused on speeds-and-feeds...this means that Sun Software becomes a core component of the sales process, and integrates experts in specific functionality, and not just product managers of certain software projects give presentations in Santa Clara; the bottom-line is that Sun has the smartest software people in the industry, and now have the product-set to accomplish a new type of offering that IBM, HP, and Dell cannot match...this is not a Solaris pitch, this is a Glassfish/MySQL offering...
c. Re-constitute Reference Architectures (RA)
For some reason, this competitive advantage was taken out of rotation gradually and it should be a part of every single product release from here on out. No product or solution gets announced until it has been sized, tested, documented, and implemented in iForce Centers, which will greatly reduce the random noise that comes out of Sun PR...RA's are perfectly fine for price-listing now that they have been used for more than a decade, and this is what solution selling is about, not catch-phrases that encapsulate certain marketing terms, functionality, or made-up GSO silos; its about Sun's unique ability to provide the total solution for all types of customers...
The RA process involves the product team, the testing team, the partner org, and sales. It will enable Sun marketing to talk about the 1 remaining competitive advantage which is integration; anything that talks about scalability, performance, or high-availability is useless without the proof. Re-building the RA team by allowing a Google-like mandate to allow Sun PS, Sun Services, and the entire Solaris development team to spend part of their core working hours putting together RA's would make all the necessary corporate constituencies informed and available to the sales force...
d. Cull Oracle from the price-list in a series of moves
There is no reason to have WebLogic on the price-list. There is limited excuses for having Oracle Database on the solution selling price-list. There is very little to make of Oracle ERP that justifies the relationship. Oracle is going to be fine, there is too much emphasis on the past at Sun, and the defining marker of this is with the Oracle relationship, now is the time to end it. Begin all ERP discussions with SAP in the room, even considering the installed base. Better yet, do not even participate in ERP implementations, this is non-Web-centric, and only furthers the costs of maintenance without the associated revenues that the ERP vendors command. Make all sales contingent on the ability to expand the relationship, ERP is necessary at the operations level, it is uniquely not necessary to the Internet, where Sun makes its money. Start the painful break-up, in order to save itself.
e. Start promoting the software org.
Jonathan theoretically came from Sun Software, but more accurately was part of the Strategy team in the formative stage. His accomplishments, pronouncements, and strategies for the Sun software org. have been wide-of-the-mark. There is no way to fire Jonathan, at this stage, this would not be prudent. But his marching orders need to be prescribed more closely, and his longevity with the company has to be tied to his ability to execute a turn-around plan, not a further expansion of 'corporate clarity' in the form of OSS and his blog (his 2 main offerings in the 5 years as CEO)...
The talent within Sun is built-in to sell software middleware that accesses the unique selling points of multi-core, and the personnel needs to be expanded beyond John Fowler, and reach right over Rich Green. Too many excellent middle managers have no way to move beyond limited exposure. Start by stopping the ascent of anyone with anything to do with Solaris. Force Anil Gadre in to retirement. And make more promotions based on revenue return rather than corporate notoriety.
Conclusion
This will, in the words of my former co-worker, come across as delusional and will make me look obsessed with my former employer. But it is an honest and clear plan for the next 1.5 years, something that is dearly lacking at this point from anything coming out of Silicon Valley. I have set aside my pride numerous times, and have taken hits that i don't need to pay back anymore. But in the absence of a recognition of most of the above steps, Sun Microsystems will cease to exist...
glassfish and mysql
Its the dead middle of the night, or perhaps even the early morning for u early risers, so i have just a couple of hours until sleep, but first Nadal...so, i'll try and put some thoughts 2gether for the recent announcement of Sun's most promising bundle since the Netscape Web/App/Directory Server combo., and infinitely more important to the ongoing effort to re-kindle some semblance of a business plan:
http://www.sun.com/aboutsun/pr/2008-06/sunflash.20080627.1.xmlIt is with great promise that Glassfish promoters welcome the MySQL offering as an add-on to the application server that could rejuvenate Sun, and here is the details:
http://www.sun.com/software/products/mysql/getit_glassfish.jspOutside of being an immense fan of Mark Herring (not Rich Green), i think this bundle is an obvious, but important milestone. For too long, the bias with GSO has been with WebLogic, particularly on Oracle Databases, and since Oracle declared war on Sun's hardware business 5 years ago, one has to wonder where the thanks are for me helping to offer an alternative (actually, John Clingan has thanked me:
http://douglasdooley-astrosolutions.blogspot.com/2007/09/glassfish-arrives.html)...
Beyond that, Sun partners everywhere know where to put their efforts, and it ain't on openSolaris or any other insanity that comes out of the Software org., that does not have anything to do with Glassfish. It is time for every last ISV to write to the app server, like Liferay is doing, and take up the struggle for Enterprise Java at the business operations level. The problem with this whole OS centric distortion that is the current predominant theme within Sun marketing is that it is a fundamentally losing battle: Linux won, get over it...
What also needs to be re-iterated is to ignore any Jonathan-banter ab/ "cloud" priorities for MySQL, and god forbid, Glassfish, it is about going in the trenches of every last Sun hardware customer and getting them off of WebLogic/Oracle, that combo. will do just fine without Sun's help, and we all know that Sun is in more dire need of a re-direction than Oracle needs Sun business...
I know, i know, i have talked about this scenario at length in previous posts and around the great Internet message boards, but it needs to be stated from someone within Sun executive management, as well, so that the sales force out there in regions as far afoot as Sri Lanka (
http://www.sun.com/worldwide/index.jsp) know what the marching orders are; i mean, c'mon, is anyone on the exec. team doing their homework, all i charge is $10K/quarter, and i'll get u a Glassfish/MySQL sales plan that will have returns in the neighborhood of incremental $100M/quarter, with a growth rate of 100%/quarter, that is my pledge...
Assuming that i will not be taken up on the offer, at least not until Mark takes over the reigns, i can only dictate from this blog. Sun is such a beautiful company, even considering my idea for Astro Microsystems (
http://douglasdooley.blogspot.com/2008/06/astro-microsystems.html), i am a lifelong fan of my first employer, and would do anything to help them get back on track, except sell my soul, already avoided that once, and refuse to go back...in the meantime, execution is something that Glassfish has on JBoss right now, and MySQL seems to have some good accomplishments - - perhaps the 2 of them 2gether will prove formidable enough to save this great institution of American business...perhaps...
Nothing will happen until GSO gets on board, though, and nothing will happen until a few calculated risks are undertaken: i mean what else is there left to lose?
application server market
Maybe i am wrong, perhaps the app server is a dying platform, i heard it straight from the product manager of JBoss recently that the world does not revolve around app servers, a seemingly innocuous comment that resonated with me for being incredibly brash considering the revenue model associated with JBoss - - I mean is there a single other product at the JBoss division that has any chance of making money?
Not rules, not transactions, not development tools, not even SOA, at least not without being a JBoss AS customer; this is why i am so comfortable going to bat for the long-ridiculed product, and forever-predicted demise of the platform that changes the economics of software...there is nothing since the operating system itself that created a market for ISVs, developers, and their customers to collaborate on the emergence of a new sub-industry within software; the database has not accomplished in 20 years what the app server has in 10...
so, it is with relative optimism that i look to a future of distributed platforms that run business transactions that inter-operate based on standards that the app server sets where business is heading; looking forward to something to replace app servers is often associated with the supposed demise of Java as the premier contrary language to a Microsoft world...this is not likely to happen anytime soon, either, so with that, i will turn my attention to how the world of enterprise software looks set to shake-out with some anecdotal remarks on what the vendors can do:
1. Pick a platform and go with it
Oracle did that yesterday with WebLogic, and they should be congratulated for just being realistic to the prospects of ongoing development on OC4J, it just doesn't make any more sense since they have the original Java application server in their arsenal. IBM, on the other hand, has yet to make this vital decision, and instead choose to bi-furcate the WebSphere and Geronimo decision with utter nonsense when it comes to pushing customers to one code-base (Geronimo) when it comes to 'entry-level' development, and to another (legacy WebSphere) when it comes to deployments; they need to re-orient all future development around Geronimo a.s.a.p.
2. Utilize OSS to compete with .Net
Glassfish is an under-heralded success in the open source community, as it is the true standard-bearer for Sun's software biz, more than openSolaris and MySQL; Sun needed to do it, and demonstrated why it is so important to utilize the Java community at large to create a platform. SpringSource is the second example of what OSS development can mean to creating critical mass, as they have moved in to tier 1 middleware status on the implementations of the legions of developers coding to Spring. And JBoss is the undeniable originator of the OSS middleware model, and will continue to have the leadership mantle as long as execution remains in view.
3. Focus on strengths, not ubiquity
There is too much at stake, and too much competition from the most viable software vendors to ever consider going after a majority of the market as JBoss GM, Muzilla, claimed in early 2008: ubiquity is not an option for anything, whether it be Java, .Net, or a vendor's solution. What should be done is get the most revenue, deployments, and mind-share in this interim period before the Internet becomes a truly global marketplace with transactions for e-commerce and supply chains being conducted on app servers. The examples are plentiful: Oracle sells WebLogic to its database customers; Red Hat sells JBoss on Linux deployments; Sun sells deployment capabilities on its Java hardware; IBM does the same....but it seems that only Oracle is willing to make the necessary adjustments to prioritize their product-line and core customer base over the mantra of being all things to all audiences...
4. Promote JEE
.Net is not and never will be dead, it is only a matter of time before 50% of departmental applications are built from Microsoft tools, but that does not mean that 50% of the influence in the market will go to MSFT, the real money is on the back-end with automated transactional processing and business process management - - this is where Enterprise Java has an undeniable advantage for integration and scalability. JEE is the one thing that stands in the way of Visual Studio converting the entire enterprise development community and its associated customer base; calling JEE d.o.a. or 'irrelevant' is narrowly-focused banter, and is purely ignorant of the trend to distributed systems based on Java web services, including EJB end-points, JAX, JBI, and other associated specifications that enable the app server to inter-operate with .Net...
5. Focus on deployments, not development
For years, we have been hearing that developers hold the keys to all decisions, and this is still true to an extent, but developers are notoriously investigative in their downtime, and need to stay within company practices when they are on the clock at Fortune 2000 clients, as well as doing contract work for SMBs...the vendors need to provide better or any tools to help with the deployment and integration of JEE applications and components in order to make the transition from experimental development in to hardened deployment more smooth; the standard-bearer for this type of work can be found in the previous iterations of Sun's Reference Architectures, as well as countless other best practices from tier-1 vendors...
6. SOA is about re-use
Integration needs to develop along standards, and there is plenty of old code that can be incorporated in to modern Java apps through the Java web services specifications; components for business logic are the ideal, but countless opportunities exist to provide re-use at all levels of software integration...the application server is the glue that will incorporate all the functionality to make SOA useful...
7. Go for the kill on the back-end
Do not let Microsoft splinter the Java market through better marketing on a one-stop shop approach, make inter-operability the core value proposition that incorporates portability of Java across platforms. The Spring team and EJB expert group need to come to an agreement on a direction forward, and the onus is on both to utilize best practices to stop the vitriol, and focus on the common enemy; this more than anything would enable Enterprise Java to take the mantle from Microsoft for critical mass development and deployment, nothing less is a success...
