| By Kirk Pepperdine |
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| June 3, 2004 12:00 AM EDT |
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Just recently Gartner reported that IBM has overtaken BEA in application server market share. The interesting thing is that Gartner's expression of market share is in a single number, dollars. While dollars are certainly an important factor in declaring a market leader, is this an accurate measure of market lead? If it is, where does that leave open source offerings such as Jonas and JBoss?
My past experiences have taught me to question claims or proclamations that one company has a lead in a particular market share. Take BEA for instance. When the application market was immature, BEA's WebLogic revenue figures included those revenues that were generated by sales of Tuxedo. Not exactly a fair measure for those companies that were only offering an application server at the time. Not that anyone expects BEA (or IBM for that matter) to be fair. After all, these companies know that people use these values to aid them in their decisions to ride with one vendor over another. As such, they understand that their survival depends upon those numbers being larger than their competitors'. When people buy into the illusion of success that is created by these numbers, they create a reality and in doing so reinforce the myth that the numbers have meaning.
The next question is, how does open source get reported? By definition, open source draws no licensing revenues and by definition carries a 0% market share. Is it just me or am I right in saying that it just feels wrong to be basing an important decision on a report that cannot accurately describe the usage of all the offerings in the space that is being considered? It leads me to question the validity of any conclusion drawn from a study that demonstrated a clear inability to adequately model the space under consideration. But then again, we are talking about perceptions and perceptions can easily become reality.
To be fair, you cannot blame Gartner for this type of reporting. After all, it is this type of information that their customers are demanding. These customers will be making large investments into systems that are critical to their business needs. They need to know if the companies they are working with will remain solvent. In addition, they need to know if these companies will remain committed to the products that they are currently trying to sell. In their minds, the ability to draw in larger-than-life revenues means that a company will remain solvent and committed.
Take HP's entry into the application server market on October 24, 2000. "We'll form the core of HP's Internet offerings," said Kevin Kilroy, Bluestone's chairman and CEO. The buzz at the time was that this purchase would quickly propel HP into third place in the application server market. By June 2002, HP was reportedly in talks to sell the technology to Oracle. This can only be read as vindication to those who ignored the hype and took notice of Bluestone's 4% market share. The reality was that no one really understood how HP could expand upon a 4% share under the economic conditions of the day. The question is, was that 4% value accurate and could the results have been different if there was a fair way to calculate market share?
It seems self-evident that if those people who were making the final purchasing decision limited themselves to only considering reports of market share, there would be no open source application servers in use. After all, who in their right mind would choose to base a business-critical application on a product that enjoys a 0% market share? Since they are in use, clearly their market share is not 0%. That said, how can you measure it?
There doesn't appear to be a good answer to the question. To the point, JBoss market share is reported to be 27%. How did BZ Media come up with the 27% figure? Again, I don't know how but here is a sample of their methodology for another study. "An e-mail was sent out to 10,000 randomly selected SD Times subscribers inviting them to participate in a study. Excluding bounces, the net number of surveys delivered was 9,792." How many of these responded is not mentioned. The fact that response is optional results in the survey being nonscientific. Sure, it's an improvement in that it appears to include open source, but is it any better or are the results any more reliable?
It's difficult to say if this survey would produce a more reliable measure of market share than revenues. What it does say is that our choice of application server almost seems random, which is what you'd expect to see in a commoditized market where you should not find any differentiating factors between competing products. If I recall correctly, this was one of the original objectives behind the J2EE.
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