BEA, IBM Shake Up APP Server Market

BEA recently slashed the pricing of WebLogic Server Express, its lowest-price application server, making a version available for $495 per CPU,a drastic decrease from its previous price of $3,000 per CPU, said Eric Stahl, director of product marketing at BEA.

With WebLogic Express, BEA has undercut the pricing of rival IBM's WebSphere Express, which costs $2,000 per CPU, or $25 per user.

These low-cost application server versions have come at the expense of some core Java support,a feature some customers prefer in midmarket and department-level deployments, according to IBM and BEA.

WebSphere Express and WebLogic Express support Java Server Pages and servlet development but not Enterprise JavaBeans, Java Messaging Service or other higher-level facets of Java application development.

Meanwhile, the concept of offering a low-level Java application server is nothing new. Sun Microsystems has offered its Sun ONE Application Server, Platform Edition,which has similar functionality,for free since last year. Also, the Apache Software Foundation has offered Apache Tomcat,a free, open-source Java application server with comparable capabilities,for some time.

But the availability of free application servers hasn't affected the dominance of BEA and IBM, which have secured nearly 50 percent market share between them, according to a June 2002 report from research firm IDC.

Shawn Willett, principal analyst at Current Analysis, said making their products available for lower licensing costs will strengthen the positions of BEA and IBM, especially because they have the brand and technical support to back those products.

IBM and BEA cite different reasons for their forays into this low-end space.

IBM executives have said the company is launching a midmarket campaign against Microsoft. BEA, on the other hand, is challenging Microsoft by recrafting WebLogic for use in the departments of large enterprises, said Frazier Miller, director of product strategy at BEA.

BEA also hopes to reach the volume server market through deals with Dell Computer, Hewlett-Packard and Intel to optimize WebLogic on servers running Intel chips, solution providers said.

"Obviously, BEA is trying to get into accounts that wouldn't otherwise buy BEA," said Robert Kelley, director of marketing and alliances at Los Gatos, Calif.-based InfoGain. "I think it's a smart move."