Macromedia Dominates Application Server Software

Macromedia's ColdFusion continues to be the product to beat in the Internet application server software category of the VARBusiness Annual Report Card (ARC).

Macromedia finished with an overall score of 75, beating the four runner-up vendors--BEA, IBM, iPlanet and Oracle--each of which finished second with identical scores of 72.

Solution providers gave Macromedia top ratings in seven of the 11 criteria included in the ARC survey, including product quality/functionality, product availability and pre- and post-sales support.

Last year, Allaire's ColdFusion (Allaire has since merged with Macromedia) and IBM's WebSphere Commerce Suite tied for the top honors.

"From the beginning, we really were trying to build a product and a platform that made it possible for tens of thousands of companies to express themselves on the Web and do some creative things," says Jeremy Allaire, CTO of Macromedia. "We have tremendous customer loyalty ratings, higher than what anyone else has ever seen from a software company.

"It is a great testimonial to the success of the ColdFusion platform. With Macromedia, we are bringing together two very large communities of loyal developers and designers. It is very exciting, and we think we will be able to do some great things in the future."

In the ARC survey, solution providers gave Macromedia a loyalty rating of 8.3, far above nearest runner-up IBM, which received a 7.2 score in loyalty.

The product category includes vendors that sell software to build a variety of customized Internet-based applications, including e-commerce Web sites, Web-based personalization applications, integrated databases, mobile applications and online product catalogs.

In the past year, this category has seen continued brand expansion and growth, as all five vendors continue to integrate tools and add functionality to their existing product lines to help developers create more sophisticated Web-based applications. That expansion creates further opportunities for solution providers to deploy customized and more feature-laden solutions, and continues the trend toward extending products beyond simple Web and database servers.

As an example, Trifecta, an IBM solution provider, was able to bring up an entire e-commerce flower delivery site within 40 business days, and deliver the customer a return of its investment in less than one year, according to Mark Hanny, vice president for software channel marketing for IBM.

"We have found there is a huge gap in IT skills in the industry," Hanny says. "That, coupled with the fact that most small and midsize businesses are slow to get started in e-commerce, has created a tremendous opportunity for resellers to get into the game."

Part 3: Supporting Data

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