Successful organizations take advantage of down times as an opportunity to strengthen their competitiveness in preparation for expanding their business when better times return. Organizations can leverage technology to strengthen their position in industry, but how can this be done when budgets have been slashed and staff has been reduced? Look at your enterprise application portfolio for opportunities in reducing operational costs in favor of investing in better functionality and features which can help you be more competitive. In this article I will focus on moving proprietary and commodity Java application platform components to enterprise caliber open source alternatives to save on operational costs and faster time to market in implementing new features.
The Java application server platform market has changed since the first Java 2 Enterprise Edition specification was created in 1999. At the beginning there were plenty of ways for vendors to differentiate themselves from their competitors. The J2EE specification was broad and just having the J2EE compliant tag made the product successful. As the J2EE application server market matured, vendors added proprietary “extensions” enabling developers to add more functionality on top of what the J2EE specification required. Customers had no choice but to keep up with the proprietary vendor’s products and increasingly expensive license costs.
Today, the story is much different. There has been a proliferation of web and integration technologies which have evolved, independent of any vendor’s application server such as Struts, Spring Framework, Hibernate, etc. Running a proprietary JEE (Java Enterprise Edition - no more “2") application server does not make sense anymore. Proprietary application server platforms have big price tags and require trained staff to support. Open source application servers such as Red Hat’s JBoss Enterprise Application Platform are driving businesses away from the proprietary application server vendors due to cost savings, but also due to developer’s familiarity of open source platforms since they are freely available for download. Enterprise software developers know JBoss because they can download and install it in less than 5 minutes and Google for information they need to learn how to use it. Everything is transparent and available. When their organization’s management starts talking about reducing operational costs and the move away from the proprietary vendor’s application server platform, the software developers immediately embrace it. They rejoice and all of the sudden everyone on the development team wants to be part of projects which will run on the open source platform.
Look at your enterprise portfolio of applications and analyze the total cost of ownership for these applications. Don’t just look at the recurring license or subscription cost, also look at the costs related to internal and external resources required to maintain the applications due to them running on a proprietary application stack. In many cases moving from a proprietary application server stack such as Oracle or IBM to an open source application server stack such as JBoss could save over $300K PER YEAR based on list pricing for a 3 year, 32 CPU subscription. How can management not look at this as an opportunity to reduce costs? Save money on operational costs and invest in value driven initiatives such as enterprise application enhancements, enterprise integration initiatives or customer service web portals - all of which can make your organization more competitive.
Matt Van Bergen is a CTO at CITYTECH, Inc. a Chicago, IL based consultancy specializing in the design, development and execution of highly available and scalable enterprise applications using the Java Enterprise Edition, Microsoft .NET and Dynamic Language development platforms.
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