The Best of Both Worlds

Not so long ago, the J2EE-vs.-.Net debate raged across the IT industry, emerging as the top-of-mind choice for developers and integrators considering future, Web-based software architectures. It was one side or the other, no middle ground.

Fast-forward to today and you'll find the religious war has calmed, with no clear winner in either camp. In fact, just the opposite has occurred. J2EE and .Net development are both flourishing. Inflexible loyalists have, in some cases, begun to find a use for both paradigms in their solutions.

Meanwhile, the proliferation of Web services as a binding glue for disparate types of software has paved the way for smoother integration and interoperability between applications.

The results of the 2005 VARBusiness Annual Report Card (ARC) for Web Infrastructure & Integration Software bears that out. In this category, Microsoft's .Net platform and IBM's J2EE-based WebSphere franchise are nearly tied for first place. (Microsoft eked out the win by one point.)

"Clearly, there is nice momentum behind both J2EE and .Net," says Judith Hurwitz, president of Hurwitz & Associates in Waltham, Mass. "You don't see either one putting the other out of business."

Microsoft, true to form, had a lot of catching up to do when it first started talking about .Net five years ago. Java was hot, with IBM, BEA, Sun Microsystems and Oracle all pushing popular J2EE-based application servers as the development and deployment foundation for business software and systems. But also true to form, Microsoft created a product in Visual Studio .Net that software developers adore. Legions of code writers gobbled up .Net, attracted by the tool's simplicity and ease of use, and the speed with which they could construct complicated Web applications.

Don Child, partner-alliances manager for DataHouse, a Honolulu-based solution provider specializing in custom-application development, says the company, a longtime IBM partner, has a deep heritage in Java-based development. But recently, it expanded to include Microsoft-based development, using Visual Studio .Net to build a portal-based software solution for a physician's network. "It has been a learning experience for us, because we've been primarily Java, but we've got it figured out now," Child says.

Child says DataHouse still struggles with Microsoft's software-licensing labyrinth and how to get sales and technical resources. With that, he says, IBM has been the easier partner to work with. "IBM gets very involved with us in the field, if needed," Child explains. "With Microsoft, it's more frontier-like. You need to do a lot of learning on your own."

And yet, Microsoft ranked first in the ARC for its Solution-Provider Program, Communication with partners and for Ease of Doing Business.

Patrick Richer likes what he has seen of Microsoft's revamped partner program. The software sales director at Microserv in Montreal notes that the program has improved dramatically in the past 18 months. The forthcoming addition of a licensing competency for partners is good news for this large-account reseller.

"I would say the hottest thing right now is everything revolving around [Microsoft's] operating system and all that is connected to it: workflow products, management products, etc.," he says.

The other ranked companies are both purveyors of J2EE-based infrastructure software, but their stories diverge. Oracle, scoring third, improved greatly from last year, particularly in the Product Innovation category, where it grabbed first place for Product Quality/Reliability.

On the opposite side is BEA. Once the highest-flying J2EE player, it ranked last in every area except Communication.

"BEA has some really nice technology pieces, but somehow they have fallen flat," Hurwitz says.