Giga: BEA, IBM Tied for App Server Market Lead

BEA Systems IBM

BEA and IBM now both have 34 percent of the market for Java-based app servers, tied for the No. 1 position, Giga said. 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 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.

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

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

Both BEA and IBM, like competing vendor Sun, also have been focusing on delivering an end-to-end e-business application and Web services platform based on J2EE rather than focus solely on selling app servers, observers said. To make Java a more formidable competitor against Microsoft's .Net, all three vendors are combining portal, integration and Web services development functionality atop their Java-based app server products, with the app server acting as the foundation for the platform.