Over 1/3rd Users Looking To Switch From WebSphere & WebLogic Application Servers
A study has found that 36% of WebLogic and WebSphere users are likely to move to a different primary production application server within two years. IT and business leaders cited vendor lock-in, high cost, and difficulty of management as the top three reasons they are dissatisfied.
These are the results of a research report by Mulesoft, conducted in collaboration with Computerworld, to provide insight to the current state of the application server market. However do note that the survey question is a leading one and might not reflect true sentiment. The question says “If you could personally make the decision, would you use a different application server in production?”.
The findings also indicate that while Apache Tomcat eliminates some of the primary issues caused by the legacy Java EE application servers, respondents also cite some barriers to deploying Tomcat in production. As a result, only 31% of Tomcat users have deployed it as their primary production application server.
“Our survey shows that more than one third of production application server users are looking for alternatives, and may benefit from a lighter-weight alternative,” said Bill Laberis, Editorial Director of Computerworld Custom Solutions Group. “With additional features for management, application deployment and performance diagnostics, Tomcat could become truly enterprise-ready for production deployment, further accelerating the shift towards Tomcat.”
“The results of this study show clearly that there is a groundswell of demand for an alternative to legacy application servers like WebSphere and WebLogic,” said Greg Schott, CEO of MuleSoft. “While we are already seeing a surge of migration from Java EE to lightweight alternatives such as Tomcat, that trend will only accelerate with new products now in the marketplace that address some of the enterprise functionality gaps in ‘plain-vanilla’ Tomcat.”
Also according to the report, Tomcat is the most widely deployed open source application server, with twice the user penetration of Red Hat JBOSS and four times that of Sun Glassfish. As with all such surveys, the results need to be taken with a pinch of salt, however they might do show overall trends.
