InformationWeek

Sybase also falls into this category with its Jaguar transaction-processing monitor. These vendors are capitalizing on the opportunity to leverage their core competencies in a new application market, in an effort to capture additional IT expenditures from their existing customers, as well as new accounts.

What's The Best Strategy?
So which type of vendor makes the most sense? As always, it depends on your applications and your needs. The key is to align your requirements with the overall capabilities and strategies of the various solution providers.

For example, in many cases the independent vendors provide extremely strong and open technologies, broad-based standards support, and a focus on specific vertical markets or application types that may be a perfect match for your needs.

But for some independent vendors, long-term company stability may be questionable, as many smaller vendors continue to pursue opportunities to go public or become targets for acquisition.

The infrastructure vendors offer attractive solutions, especially if you've already standardized or invested heavily in a vendor's other technologies and infrastructure components. But keep in mind that these vendors offer Web application servers as a strategic product line to support the broad-based sales of all of their products; you may find yourself locked in to a particular vendor's offerings.

Finally, vendors of the object transaction-monitoring systems offer compelling technologies because their middleware components are their core strengths. An advantage of this approach is that you can use these middleware components in other applications, not just your Web apps. On the downside, such technologies generally lack the rich development environments and application-building simplicity that are commonly found in other types of solutions.

It's also important to understand the dynamics of the Web application server market. Though we're likely to see more consolidation over the next year or two, there are too many players for the market to shake out to just a handful of vendors in the next two years. If you've been taking a wait-and-see attitude, your decision won't get much easier right away.

Finally, keep in mind that no matter how much the Web application server products have matured, developing and running real business applications over the Web is far from simple. Today's products still require highly skilled developers, and custom integration remains a big part of Web application deployments. Companies that think they can find a tool that provides the flexibility to support varying developer skill levels and integration requirements must realize that most vendors don't offer a one-size-fits-all solution.

Gautam Desai is a senior analyst, Joe Fenner is a senior technical writer, Jeetu Patel is VP of research, and Mark Schenecker is VP of electronic commerce at Doculabs, an independent advisory firm that specializes in infrastructure components and technologies for Web applications, knowledge-management, document-management, and document-output strategies.