AMR Research said Thursday that application-server vendors had for the most part reached feature parity, and predicted the $3 billion market would come down to four significant players: BEA Systems, IBM, Microsoft, and Oracle.
The winning lineup is not a major surprise, though the decision to leave Sun Microsystems off that list will surely raise some eyebrows. But Sun, through its iPlanet unit that has been taken in-house, has never been a major winner in the app-server market share race—though its control of the enterprise Java platform certainly makes it an influential player.
In addition to the top four (plus Sun), AMR also looked at servers from Hewlett-Packard and Sybase. It's notable that literally no small vendors remain in the app-server race. Most have sold-out to the big boys, or in the case of more application-oriented companies such as ATG or Broadvision, have tweaked their applications to run on industry-leading application server platforms.
|