Not quite as noisy as its competitors, IBM has been methodically growing its share of the application server market that as of 2012 IBM WebSphere had 60% of the market, easily moving it to being a defacto standard. On this trajectory they could easily own 70% of the market in the next two years.
IBM feels it is strong in this market and notes that success in a release last month is because “Mission critical application servers are needed in the enterprise to support scalability, reliability, and security. More light weight open source application servers have a place in the market for web presence software, but for a solution that involves transactions intensively and has the downside of losing significant revenue if the site is down the mission critical servers are needed.
IBM WebSphere application server is a proven, high-performance transaction engine that can help build, run, integrate, and manage dynamic web applications. The IBM WebSphere application server Liberty profile option and development tool options extend the mission critical aspects of the system. Intelligent management capabilities minimize end-user outages and maximize operations monitoring and control of the production environment.”
IBM like many companies in this space have been preparing for the inevitable flood of business oriented application needs. Some driven by the “Internet of Things” (IoT) where nearly everything in our lives is somehow tied to the Internet wirelessly. Still others are the increased need for more sophisticated tools in the field, tying critical systems together and accessed securely on a mobile device.
Again in their release they need only point to known statistics. “The J2EE application server software market is defined by the ability to build mission critical web sites that support a globally integrated enterprise. Strong growth is anticipated as tablets, smartphones, and mobile devices replace PCs. Mobile devices proliferate with 6.9 billion smartphones anticipated to be installed in 2019.
There are now 6.9 billion cell phone registered, paying users. Portable, mobile systems will expand the Internet at a pace not yet achieved. It is anticipated that the apps market will expand from $24 billion in 2013 to $35 trillion by 2019. This expansion of mobile computing at the device level is nothing compared to what is happening at the machine to machine (m to m) communications, with sensors being located everywhere, and monitoring of those sensors proliferating.”
All of this data was drawn from the a recent WinterGreen Research report which they offer for sale and is an independently driven study of the application server marketplace. Yet much of what they have previewed from the report is consistent with multiple existing application trends and certainly reflects strongly the rising interest in the “Internet of Things” and the new emerging technologies to support it.
Many companies will either need to consider strongly whether they should jump on the IBM WebSphere train or, if they are already riding it, how they should approach planning and developing applications for their enterprise. There are a number of both U.S. and offshore based entities already equipped to aid you with the due diligence necessary for a successful implementation or with application development for the platform. Many offshore companies have built practices around supporting WebSphere in particular and are capable of providing the support at dramatically lower costs.
With IBM once again claiming dominance over a very large market segment, keeping up with its many capabilities will take good business sense and careful planning.
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