IBM Websphere - officially better than anything, ever
Oct 7th, 2008 by sharps
The Websphere Marketing team must be overjoyed to read the recent EDC report - “Application Servers 2008 Rankings” by Janel Garvin (it’s free but you need to register). The report is almost too good to be true for Big Blue - Not only does IBM win outright but it also kicks BEA / Oracle’s butt all the way back to 7th place (out of eight) - something they’ve been wanting to do since the dawn of time - and of all the years; it happens this year - Websphere’s 10th anniversary. Incredible timing. Even more incredible - Geronimo comes in at #2 - another big win for IBM (who sponsor Geronimo). The Websphere Marketing team won’t even have to work hard to turn this into some positive PR. The independent report starts like this :
IBM’s WebSphere application server is now ten years old, and during that time, it has evolved and matured into what its users think of as the best application server anywhere, but most especially in the large enterprise market where IBM has traditionally had its home. Make no mistake about it, WebSphere is a powerhouse in many ways, and its users truly love this
product.
Fantastic - already written in press-ready language - could be lifted and dropped straight into a press release. So good - it could have been written by Websphere’s marketing team themselves !
OK, by now you think you’ve seen through by thinly veiled blast at EDC’s report. You think I’m bitter because JBoss came in 5th (out of eight). Right ?
Well hold on. Though I have some issues with the report which I’ll get to - JBoss actually did very well - after all we beat Weblogic - which is no small feat. And there are other bits of the report worth highlighting. Here’s one quote I like which enforces what many other analysts are saying about JBoss and something that differentiates us from our Open Source brethren :
JBoss Enterprise Application Platform competes with Oracle’s Application Server, WebLogic, and IBM’s WebSphere in the high-end market for large corporate applications. The recent acquisition of BEA by Oracle may provoke some consternation and uncertainty amongst the end users of both WebLogic and Oracle AS, which in turn provides an opportunity for both JBoss and IBM.
And another that demonstrates that JBoss is focussed on our customer’s highest priorities :
JBoss really shone in the areas of security where users gave it the best ratings of any product in the survey, compatibility with other software, and the very important value to cost ratio.
The second point is worth repeating, given the economic situation we find ourselves in - JBoss had the best value to cost ratio.
So I’m actually not bitter - if you’re the underdog competing with some significantly larger competitors - this kind of validation is golden and It shows that JBoss is till punching way above it’s weight. I’m not bitter but my spidey-senses are tingling; there’s something just not right about this report.
Methodoloy
I find EDC’s methodology odd. It’s not clear how many responses were received for each question or for each vendor. For example you would expect to see many responses for Windows Server 2003 vs something like NetWeaver (which isn’t quite as main stream) - the number of responses is significant both statistically and as a proxy for adoption / acceptance.
Bucks the general consensus
The results just don’t seem right. I’ve worked for 2 of the vendors on the list (previously Sun and currently Red Hat) and know the other vendors really well having been involved in this space for as long as anyone. Though I trust my instinct - that isn’t good enough so let’s compare some other data. Forrester recently released a report (also based on a user survey) covering some aspects of the EDC report. In that report WAS 6 did significantly better than WAS 5 but generally scored lower than JBoss. For example :
The EDC report doesn’t correlate with the summary points of the recent Burton report on JBoss. Also it doesn’t correlate with our own (sponsored) satisfaction surveys (like this). I find it strange that WAS scores so well and Weblogic scores so badly - putting them in seventh plance out of eight just seems a little too extreme and a little to convenient. I’ve yet to personally meet a Websphere customer who says good things about WAS - maybe I only meet the customers who’ve already decided to move to JBoss ?
Third - I talk to customers every week and Red Hat’s sales team a couple of times a day and I just don’t see Geronimo mentioned at all - few if any user satisfaction surveys actually call out Geronimo - what was it about these respondents that give them an unrepresentative affinity towards Geronimo ? I just don’t understand why Geronimo is in the survey.
So a couple of request to EDC - 1. open up the unfettered results; 2. provide a little more detail on the methodology; and 3. confirm that this was a purely independent survey that wasn’t paid for or unduly influenced by any of the vendors included in the survey.
http://blog.softwhere.org/archives/331
Well you are no angel yourself presenting a bar chart that has an axis starting at 3. Such graphical lies will not give you any credit with people that have some degree of intelligence and respect for accurate information reporting. A cheap trick by RedHat PR. So please put down the stone unless you are willing to stand inline yourself.
William
William, thanks for the comment.
The chart you mention comes from a satisfaction report that *Red Hat sponsored* - we do it every year as a gauge to see how we’re doing - and to understand where we need to improve. If we wanted to use it as a cheap publicity stunt we could do much better - we paid for it after all. While the chart is probably a little misleading at first glance and visually suggests a greater difference - the value of the y-axis is clearly shown - so most people can see it doesn’t start at zero. Even if it did - the difference is still pretty significant. I’ll mention this to the vendor for next year’s survey.
I’m willing to stand in line - we have little choice at Red Hat - most of what we do is transparent anyway.
- Rich
Hi Rich,
I do not regard to complete report from RedHat as a “cheap publicity stunt”. I do think that baselining the charts at point 3 is a cheap visual trick. The authors should know better.
I will admit I was also surprised by the report which rated WebSphere so highly but you must also admit that a lot of people that do despise the product are generally referring to experiences with older versions. The recent versions are solid though they do always have that IBM feel just like your releases having that “JBoss” feel.
It would be interesting to know more about the sample population used and whether it is indeed representative of the market.
William
Are you kidding me?
“Make no mistake about it, WebSphere is a powerhouse in many ways, and its users truly love this product.”
I’m a WebSphere user and I have no love for it. In fact, I truly HATE it. We’re a fairly large WebSphere shop and I think you would be hard pressed to find a single developer that actually likes WebSphere. Unfortunately, our ops people are stuck in their ways and don’t want to change. We keep proposing different options and they keep pushing back.
We’ll move away from WebSphere eventually and I can guarantee we won’t be moving to Geronimo.
I have never met any developer who liked WebSphere - in fact most of them hated it. I worked for 2 years on the Java J2EE environment, and every few days the experienced Java developers kept trying to convince me that Java is not so bad because WebSphere was such a dud. I even wrote a blog post in the subject:
http://inquisitorjax.blogspot.com/2007/08/random-thoughts-ibm-has-best-sales-team.html
@Mike @Inquisitor :
https://www.redhat.com/wapps/store/catalog.html
1-866-2REDHAT x45014
Operations people tend to like products that do have at least a management console that is integrated and reliable with a distributed deployment/provisioning infrastructure.
The IBM user experience has always been lacking from a developer perspective when it comes to their middleware and runtime products.
William
Remember that for large enterprises, the cost of developing a business-critical J2EE app is completely dwarfed by a) the cost of provisioning and scaling it in a secure, reliable data center with 24/7 support and b) the cost to their business if it goes down.
For that reason, they couldn’t care less whether developers find WAS difficult to deal with. It stays up (v6+ at least), and there is plenty of WAS ops & support knowledge available from IBM themselves and others. That’s all that matters to them.
Having used Weblogic 5-7 and Websphere 6 and 6.1 - I have to say I don’t think Websphere is such a horrible product, but RAD 6 and 7 have the worst app server integration I have ever seen. For the life of me, I don’t understand how I had better luck with Eclipse and Weblogic integration than I have with RAD and Websphere. Netbeans and Weblogic wasn’t bad either, as I recall.
Having just done a paper based (i.e. we haven’t actually talked to anyone yet) SOA software evaluation let me offer an SOA perspective on this. For environments where a drop in server is what the customer wants WebSphere looks extremely impressive. It ticks all the feature boxes. JBoss on the other hand has gaps in it’s feature coverage as well as a lack of implementation partners (at least in the geography we are working in). Sure if you have a development organization and the budget to integrate various third party solutions yourself you can get there but unless all of the feature boxes get ticked JBoss isn’t even going to get to the point where the developer experience can be expounded because it won’t make the short list. Oracle and BEA, by the way, also have a great feature story. The problem with choosing them at the moment is that the turmoil surrounding their integration challenges means that there is significant risk of product instability over the next year or two which is unpalatable.
[...] étude soulève déjà de nombreuses questions chez les concurrents (comme Rick Sharples, de JBoss), le marketing d’IBM n’allant pas se plaindre d’une si belle vitrine. Rick émet [...]
I worked on a banking project for over 2 years where the applications were deployed to WAS 5. It was slow, it was clunky, it was a bitch to configure, was practically useless for developer use for testing (developers used JBoss locally and the integration tests were done against WAS). Having said all that, it was incredibly stable and in production it was up 24/7.
Then we migrated to WAS 6 and I have to admit I was truly impressed. Startup times were reduced, speed increased, the user interface improved. It acually became usable for local testing and I switched from JBoss to it (it was still slower than JBoss but I thought it safer to run the tests against the final production environment).
So I have to say that there *are* developers and customers who do like WAS, especially the latest version. I agree with your thoughts about Geronimo though, I haven’t come across it being used in any company I’ve worked for or by anyone I know.
IBM best? Wow… That says something about the overall quality of application servers…. Seriosly, I’d rather have my dog chew of my penis than having to use WebSphere again…
[...] you’re probably already aware - I’m always ready to have a chuckle at IBM’s expense - I have nothing in particular against IBM but if you can’t take the piss out of mammoth [...]