IBM Corp. will release a plug-in next week for its WebSphere Studio development environment that will allow customers to test and deploy applications on BEA Systems Inc.’s WebLogic Server application server software, an IBM official said.
The plug-in will be announced at IBM’s developerWorks Live show in New Orleans and will be made available for download April 10th from IBM’s developer site, said Bernie Spang, director of IBM’s WebSphere Studio group.
Some businesses have mixed application server environments, and IBM wants to provide those developers with additional choices as to which development environments they can work with, he said. WebSphere Studio already can be used to create applications for the open-source Apache Tomcat application server, he said.
“The primary motivation is to make our customers happy and to make their development teams and their development processes more streamlined and more efficient. We want to broaden the platform choices they have,” Spang said.
Another goal is to try to eat into the customer base of BEA, its chief rival, by making it easier for those customers to standardize on IBM’s WebSphere products should they wish to, according to Ted Schadler, an analyst with Forrester Research Inc. in Cambridge, Mass.
Customers who have unused CPU licenses for BEA’s WebLogic Server will be able to build applications for those Servers even if their developers are using primarily IBM WebSphere Studio, he noted.
However, Schadler said, “It’s hard to be successful in the market with these replacement strategies. People aren’t going to say, ‘Now I can code in WebSphere Studio and deploy on WebLogic, my day is saved.’ But for people who have a commitment to WebLogic but whose corporate standard is becoming WebSphere, it may be attractive to those people,” he said.
“There’s certainly an element of this that assists with migration,” IBM’s Spang said, although he argued that this is not IBM’s chief goal.
The first version of the plug-in will be available for Microsoft Corp.’s Windows NT, Windows XP and Windows 2000 operating systems, with support for Linux distributions from Red Hat Inc. and SuSE Linux AG planned for later in the year, he said. The plug-in is free for WebSphere customers and works with WebLogic versions 6.1 and 7.0.
BEA welcomed the move, calling it a testament to BEA’s traction in the market and evidence that customers are asking IBM to support its WebLogic software.
