(March 25, 2002) - With the JavaOne conference in San Francisco in full swing all this week, it's time for a little cool, calm math. According to a recent study by the Giga Information Group, the overall market for Java app servers in 2001 was a staggering $2.19 billion. So what does a 34% market share represent? Well, in addition to being a whole lot of dollars, it represents the reason IBM now ranks equal with BEA Systems in this space, that's what.

At 34% apiece, Big Blue has for the first time drawn level with BEA in the market share race--measured in terms of sales revenue--and it comes at just the right time. The WebSphere family of products has caught up with the WebLogic family by racking up a staggering 50% growth rate through 2001.

BEA advocates have been claiming "Foul!" and saying that the Giga figures are unfairly skewed in WebSphere's favor, since they take into account services revenue, rather than measuring revenue generated purely by selling live deployments. But Big Blue, for its part, must be tremendously pleased that it has, through its IBM Global Services "double play," found a way of ending up neck-in-neck with BEA in revenue terms, even though is has just a 22% share of the market in terms of live deployments (compared to BEA's 37%).

And the 34% tied-for-first revenue figure is even more impressive when you consider that for EJB-based deployments IBM comes in at just 14% compared to BEA's 52%. (Both those figures are not from Giga but from the latest META Group study.) IBM, in other words, is monetizing WebSphere at the moment far more efficiently than BEA is monetizing WebLogic.

This financial success in its famous rivalry aside, what is IBM bringing to JavaOne in technical terms?

It's bringing a new "Integration Edition" of its WebSphere Studio development platform, for starters. This is based on the Eclipse toolset and code that's already been released by IBM to the open source community. And it's also bringing WebSphere Application Server 4.1, an updated version of its core server - tweaked so as to enable the use of Web services as an integration tool.

As part and parcel of supporting the rise of Web services, IBM will also release a UDDI server for companies to use in building the registries that allow outsiders to "discover" Web services once they're built and available.

The Integration Edition of WebSphere studio launches officially on March 31, but developers will be able to test it at JavaOne and see for themselves how it compares to the Developer Edition already released, for building J2EE and EJB apps for the WebSphere application server.