ARC Development Tools: Allaire Edges Out Rivals

Allaire was the surprise winner in the enterprise development tools category of this year's Annual Report Card contest, leveraging top scores in such areas as product availability and channel strategy to overcome larger rivals, including Microsoft and IBM.

"We go after a different market than our competitors," says Dan Murphy, JRun product marketing manager, in explaining Allaire's strong showing. "Our market niche is not the high end. The mass enterprise is our sweet spot."

Allaire's customers are usually companies that need quick time-to-market, yet operate under budget-ary constraints, he adds. JRun costs less than competing products, but still provides healthy margins to solution-provider partners, he says. "Our key benefit is ease of use," Murphy says. "Developers can pick up JRun and be productive with it in a very short time frame. Some existing products are complex and hard to use."

Allaire finished or tied for first in four partnership criteria. "Sixty to 70 percent of the JRun business goes through the channel," Murphy says. "Java requires some level of service, and we try to push service and implementation to our channel partners."

Allaire's Alliance partner program accommodates consulting partners, hosting partners and sales partners, which include solution providers, catalogs and e-tail stores, Murphy adds.

Allaire finished second to IBM in support, and Murphy agrees that its presales support needs work. "Our biggest challenge is getting Java-savvy people in the door," he says. "We have initiatives to beef up our presales team. We've added 10 dedicated sales engineers, and we're looking to do more."