An Open Letter to BEA WebLogic Customers

Dear BEA WebLogic Customer:

As you probably know, Oracle just announced it is acquiring BEA for $8.5 billion. Independent industry analyst Vinnie Mirchandani said about the deal: "Customers, unlike investors, do not have much to cheer." You are now facing a vendor that will put you in one of two situations:

• They will discontinue the WebLogic product line forcing you to rip-and-replace with Oracle Fusion middleware
• They will continue the WebLogic product line, but will drive very little innovation. After all, as many industry experts have noted, Oracle is buying BEA mainly for the continuous maintenance and support revenue stream from its large customer base (that's you!)

Either way, you're not in a very strong bargaining position.

Perhaps more importantly, this acquisition is the final nail in the coffin of what was the motivation for J2EE in the first place: to have an open standard that allows easily switching from one vendor's product to another. The reality is that there are now two mega-vendors, Oracle and IBM, each with what is essentially their proprietary, bloated middleware stack, which requires complex integration of multiple components (and surely Oracle or IBM professional services will be happy to perform this work – for a fee).

We have a better proposition for you: turn this predicament into an opportunity; an opportunity to free yourself of J2EE altogether, reduce costs, increase the agility of your enterprise and significantly shorten your time-to-market for new products and services.

You can do that by leveraging a truly open middleware stack — parts of which you may be using already, such as Spring , Hibernate and Tomcat – and a new kind of application server, one built for the "cloud". Unlike a J2EE application server it is:

• Built from the ground-up for a scale-out computing model, allowing your applications to easily and dynamically scale across a virtual pool of low-cost commodity servers, just like Google;
• Built from the ground-up for Service-Oriented Architecture, enabling you to easily add and change software services, and re-use existing investments in software development;
• A single product that handles messaging, business logic and transactional data through an open-source, commonly used programming model, so your developers can focus on what they do best: quickly deliver new applications and functionality to your business, without having to deal with the complexity of writing and integrating infrastructure software.

GigaSpaces XAP is that application server, and it is already in use today by some of the world's leading organizations such as Lehman Brothers, Dow Jones, Nortel Networks and Virgin Mobile. GigaSpaces adds the core layer of middleware virtualization that will enable you to be independent of J2EE, while remaining compatible with it.

With this approach, you can significantly reduce costs by:

• Increasing server throughput which reduces the amount of servers and software licenses required to handle the same volumes
• Shorter time-to-market of new software products and services:
• Reduce deployment complexity – To scale, simply drop in more processing resources with no code changes.
• Avoid development complexity -Simple, open-source and commonly used development frameworks
• Increasing reliability through better testability and self-healing
• Utilizing a single platform for Java, .Net and C++

To find out more:

Contact us at: info@gigaspaces.com or visit http://www.gigaspaces.com/no-j2ee

Join us in a live webinar on Thursday, January 24, 2 PM EST/11 AM PST, in which we present what the alternative stack and GigaSpaces can do for you. Register Here . 

Sincerely,

The GigaSpaces Team

UPDATE: For more information on GigaSpaces position on the acquisition and its alternative solution, see this post from Nati Shalom, GigaSpace CTO and Founder.