BEA, IBM Share Lead In J2EE App Server Arena

BEA and IBM each have 34 percent of the market for Java-based application servers, tied for the No. 1 position, according to a report by Mike Gilpin, vice president and research fellow at Giga.

Sun Microsystems' iPlanet line was a distant third, with 7 percent market share, followed by Oracle9i with 6 percent and Sybase's EAServer with 4 percent.

Giga had previously forecast that BEA would come out with 36 percent of the 2001 market share and IBM with 34 percent. The new numbers, however, are the firm's final for 2001.

According to the report, the application server market grew 39 percent in 2001 to $2.19 billion. IBM's growth rate in the market was 50 percent, while BEA's was 30 percent.

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Solution providers said no matter which company is in the lead, BEA and IBM are still the two most pervasive J2EE-based application servers in the industry.

"We definitely see a lot of leveling out in terms of the app server market," said Mike DeBellis, e-business CTO of Deloitte Consulting, New York. "BEA is clearly one of the winners. Frankly, it comes down to BEA and IBM."

In his report, Gilpin credits IBM's success in 2001 to improvements it made to the WebSphere line, as well product leadership in Web services support.

"Another factor that led to IBM's acceleration in market share was its lead among J2EE vendors in embracing Web services and in bringing those concepts into its platform as first-class elements alongside J2EE," Gilpin said.

Both BEA and IBM, like competing vendor Sun, also have been focusing on delivering an end-to-end e-business applications and Web services platform based on J2EE rather than focus solely on selling application servers, analysts and solution providers say.

To make Java a more formidable competitor against Microsoft's .Net platform, all three vendors are combining portal, integration and Web services development functionality atop their Java-based application server products, with the application server acting as the foundation for the platform.