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DAILY NEWS AND INFORMATION FOR THE GLOBAL GRID COMMUNITY /
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Applications:
webMethods CUSTOMERS MOVE AWAY FROM PROPRIETARY APP SERVERS
webMethods Inc announced that more customers are shifting away from
proprietary application server technologies by adopting open source
alternatives and pure service-oriented architecture (SOA) solutions.
"By combining recent reports from industry analysts and information on what
our own customers are doing, it appears that proprietary application server
technology is becoming increasingly less significant," said Graham Glass, CTO
of webMethods Inc. "The quick adoption of open source application server
alternatives, including JBoss and Geronimo, helps make the market for
application server technology more commoditized. Additionally, we're seeing a
tremendous demand for pure service-oriented architecture solutions, including
our own webMethods Fabric, which has the ability to replace application server
platforms."
webMethods was recently selected by a major aerospace manufacturer and a
subsidiary of a major North American telecommunications company over a
proprietary application server technology due to the SOA capabilities of
webMethods Fabric. In addition, financial services firms are expressing strong
interest in leveraging next generation SOA architecture, such as webMethods
Fabric, for future development. webMethods Fabric is an Enterprise
Service-Oriented Architecture (ESOA) infrastructure for building, deploying
and managing applications based on Web services standards. It enables the
construction of business systems that are distributed, componentized,
standards-based, open, scalable and vendor-neutral.
webMethods Fabric runs non-intrusively in the servers that provide the Web
services in a customer's environment -- whether those Web services originate
from webMethods' software, J2EE-based applications, .NET-based applications,
other packaged applications, or products from competing vendors -- enriching
those services with a powerful set of SOA characteristics. While application
servers provide the capabilities for hosting individual Web services, they do
not include the ESOA infrastructure necessary for assembling large, dynamic,
robust, managed systems out of these services.
The use of open source application server technologies continues to grow and
take market share away from traditional proprietary application server
vendors. For example, the JBoss open-source application server is experiencing
high customer demand. JBoss has been downloaded more than 4 million times
since its release in 2001 and is now deployed in nearly 30 percent of
development and production environments, making it the industry's fastest
growing Java-based application server in use.
According Yefim Natis, vice president and research director at Gartner, "As
the J2EE standard stabilized and became well-established in mainstream
enterprises, users became more open to an off-the-shelf, low-cost
implementation. Standardization leads to reduced differentiation and puts
pressure on the commercial vendors to reduce prices."
In August 2003, webMethods announced the general availability of the JBoss
open source application server within the webMethods Integration Platform;
more than 400 customers have already downloaded the product. The combination
of the JBoss application server with the webMethods Integration Platform marks
the industry's first unified solution that enables users to link their
J2EE-based business logic with a proven, enterprise-class integration solution
without requiring the extensive coding and configuration efforts typical of
more conventional solutions.
webMethods already supports other industry-leading application servers, and
will continue to provide this support so that customers have the greatest
level of flexibility and reusability of existing investments. However, time
and again, customers have expressed the advantages of fewer moving parts in
their IT architecture. The benefits of the webMethods and JBoss solution
includes better automation of customers' business processes due to the
incorporation of legacy and custom Java applications in the same process. This
approach delivers higher availability and reliability of customers'
integration and development environments.
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