Gary Barnett
IBM buys Gluecode Software
IBM has announced its intention to acquire Gluecode software, an open-source startup company that sells software, services and support on top of the Geronimo J2EE application server. The financial terms of the deal have not been announced Comment: At last! IBM looks like it's about to embrace an open-source application server platform, something that we've been telling the company to do for the last two years. This deal could have a huge impact on the application server market as IBM forces commoditisation at the application server layer. IBM's Websphere family is based on IBM's own J2EE application server, but the value of Websphere lies in the raft of products that sit on top of it. By adopting - or at least supporting - an open source product, IBM would benefit in a number of ways. Firstly, IBM's clients get choice. They can start with the free application server then move up to IBM's own product when their requirements for scalability or performance dictate. Secondly, IBM gets a new channel for the value-added services (integration, portal, support for Services Oriented Architectures) that WebSphere contains. Finally, by changing the economics of the application server market, IBM sends a clear message to competitors like BEA that it's keen to see the application server market consolidate and to get the players competing on the basis of higher-level services. This strategy plays extremely well for IBM, because BEA has nothing like the breadth and depth of services that IBM has in Websphere.
