At JavaOne this year, one of the biggest announcements (albeit this one had nothing really to do with Java) was the acquisition of SeeBeyond by Sun Microsystems. It looks like Sun is putting its cash, which it has plenty of, to good use. As we have seen over the last decade of Java, Sun is not really a poster child for making money from software sales. The SeeBeyond acquisition seems to indicate a shift in paradigm, an attempt to drive a stake into another tier (SOA) of the multi-tier enterprise application stack, a way to expand the customer base, and perhaps make some money on software.

The market is developing in an interesting way for vendors who are providing the stack around Java as the platform is being increasingly applied to enterprise solutions. Currently if you look at the market for J2EE (or J EE as the old Java pig with a new lipstick is now called), the application server space has consolidated around a handful of vendors - IBM, BEA, Oracle, Sun, and JBoss. Of these, IBM and BEA are actually the ones that have install bases, which have been used for enterprise applications in large corporations. Oracle is late to the market and is trying to play the catch-up game. JBoss has not yet made a dent in large organizations. And Sun's app server (rebranded for the nth time to "Java System Application Server") has really made no dent in the market, in line with all the previous incarnations. Others such as Pramati are looking at partnering with SIs (system integrators) instead of competing directly in the market.

Besides having the best technology, the real play comes down to owning the right pieces of the stack. What is the solution stack on which a company will build portfolios of Java enterprise applications? Let's start from the bottom of the stack. First of all, there is the hardware. The OS runs on the hardware. The database runs on the OS. Software platforms, in this case Java, run on the OS. The application server runs on the software platform. The app server typically integrates through three main mechanisms - synchronous APIs (such as RMI.IIOP), messaging, or HTTP/SOAP (Web services-based integration). Other products, such as a BPM engine, Portal Server, Business Rules Engine, etc., run on the application server foundation. And finally, a Web server makes the application accessible on the Internet.

Of course, this is a simplified view, and there are many more building blocks that lay the foundation for the architecture. But let's go with this picture in mind and look at the top players in the market. BEA had grabbed the majority of the market share since the early days of Tengah and WebLogic by staying ahead of the technology and providing timely optimization while the Java standards were catching up to the market demands. They grabbed the market opportunity, but are currently between a rock and a hard place. The part of the stack that BEA owns is floating above the messaging infrastructure. Basically, they don't have any products that occupy the DB, OS, or hardware tiers. JBoss is another one in this position, but being open source puts them into a slightly different situation. Oracle does own a substantial chunk of the stack by virtue of their obvious presence in the DB tier.

Now let's take a look at IBM. To me, IBM is the G.E. (General Electric) of computing. They own all the pieces of the stack, from the monolithic mainframes that will live on forever to the smallest devices, to the integration technologies (remember the recent acquisition of Ascential), to the professional services you need to deploy and manage large enterprises' IT. They have it all - a true one-stop shop. IBM owns their clients - IT and process. Even Microsoft, which is always the target for a monopoly, does not own it all. Scary isn't it? In many ways, with IBM's foothold in open source, they own a large part of Java technology that is in deployment.

So to take the G.E. analogy, with IBM's offerings, you could pretty much build/buy everything from cars to refrigerators to razor blades from big blue. Eventually others will have to partner, merge, and/or reincarnate to compete successfully. I always wonder where BEA will go next. To Oracle or to Sun?