“First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then they produce lame marketing videos, then you win.”

- with apologies to the late Mahatma Gandhi.

Actually, I’d say if your competitors are producing videos at the rate that the Websphere marketing team are producing them about JBoss I think you can safely conclude that they’ve given up all hope competing with products and technology. The latest almost makes me feel a little embarrassed for the Websphere team. How the mighty have fallen.

JBoss App Server 5.1.0 CR1 – 5.1 is a pretty big milestone – it includes the new Jopr powered embedded console  – something you’ll like but also something we really need some early feedback on. Also a preview of Web Beans / JSR-299. [release notes, downloads]

Data Integration goes Open Source – I missed the launch of the Teiid Project you can find out more on the project page.

This has been brewing for a while and Manik has finally announced Infinispan – I predict that this is going to  be a pretty disruptive technology. [home page, quick guide]

JBoss Tattletale is a new tool that will analyze your code and produce detailed dependency reports – for example highlighting duplicate jars / classes, missing jars / classes, etc. [downloads, project]

The latest release of Jopr (2.2) is out – Jopr is the upstream project for JBoss Operations Network (see below). There are a shedload of UI enhancements, support for JBoss EWS and Performance improvements among other things.

Also a nice article on JBoss Cloud over on DZone.

On the JBoss Enterprise side of the house :

JBoss Operations Network 2.2 is out and JON receives a pretty decent makeover (see Greg’s post on some of the major enhancements) – product page is here.

One of the new capabilities of JON 2.2 is support for JBoss Enterprise Web Server (EWS) which was also released a few weeks ago – more on that in a future post.

If you’re currently stuck with Oracle Weblogic or IBM Websphere and need help getting off – here’s an opportunity you can’t ignore.

Sorry for the length of this post – I need to do this more frequently. The next couple of months are going to be even more hectic and you can follow the @JBossNews via Twitter. Finally, something from the happy news files – we’re still hiring.

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.

If you are an Oracle or former BEA middleware customer and are still uncertain which products Oracle will shit-can – well it seems that Oracle doesn’t know either but they are letting you vote. I applaud the democratic proces but isn’t this the kind of detail you work out before spending $6bn of your shareholder’s money ?

[Update]

The poll doesn’t seem to have anything to do with Oracle – it’s sponsored by TechTarget – I have no idea why. They seem to have made the decision already – according to the Register.

Finally – can you please get off Yahoo’s case about departing execs. – this is just mean