"If it were a fight, they'd stop it." This expression is often employed by sports announcers during a particularly lopsided football or baseball game, and also by market watchers when one business gets a clear upper hand versus its competitors.

Maybe it's time to use it when discussing IBM and BEA. Various SYS-CON publications have covered the IBM-BEA battle over the years, watching as report after report shows Big Blue overcoming an early runner-up position to emerge as the dominant player. The most recent report we've seen shows IBM expanding its number one position in the overall application integration and middleware market, capturing 37.2% of the global market vs. BEA's 7.2%. The third and fourth positions are held by Oracle with 4.4% and Microsoft with 4.3%.

Wow, wasn't that fun? You know, seeing Microsoft as the apparent bottom-feeder, with Oracle barely ahead, and BEA's pulse slowing so dramatically?

Well, another truism - one that serves as well for sports as for business and life - is "don't get cocky." And don't start to believe all those positive reviews about yourself.

The management at IBM, despite having to report a disappointing first quarter 2005, thereby sending stock-market investors to the exits for a few days, shows no signs of letting up as it continues to define and re-define the concept and execution of application development in the 21st century. Knowledgeable IT managers will seriously consider WebLogic, for example, or .NET, or the emerging Linux-driven LAMP strategy.

They will also use WebSphere as the benchmark from which to compare everything else. The world of application is insanely complex, with different approaches in different vertical markets, widely disparate IT budgets throughout the spectrum of small, medium and large businesses, and customer demands that range from straightforward to a full-on "customer360" environment 24/7/365. We're happy to report a diverse group of articles in this month's issue of WebSphere Journal that address some of the numerous important topics facing developers. We are featuring the first part of an interview with Doug Wilson, the CTO of IBM Lotus, with a sidebar by WebSphere Portal Senior IT Architect Richard Gornitsky. Readers will be familiar with their work in these pages, including an article they wrote for us in the March 2005 issue. (Look for another installment of the interview and the article next month!)

We have also developed features that discuss the value of modeling, how to move from business modeling to web implementation, the importance of industry standards, and how to add logging to portlets. And as another common expressions states, "But wait! There's more!" Indeed. More content in this issue, continuing coverage of WebSphere in particular and web services in general online at SYS-CON Media, and more success to WebSphere developers and IBM, if, in the words of yet another expression, "the numbers don't lie." For IBM and WebSphere, we believe the numbers speak the truth. We're still in the early rounds, but IBM is clearly winning this fight.