Sacha’s Weblog

You should really take a look at Darryl Taft’s excellent article on the History of the WebSphere line of business, it is very interesting.

It describes how this adventure started:

Only Sabbah remains at IBM of the three lieutenants. Sabbah, who was Mills’ CTO at the time, is now general manager of IBM’s Rational business unit. Swainson is CEO of CA, and Spector is vice president of research and special initiatives at Google

And how they then initiated the WebSphere (WS) effort with just 25 engineers and how WS moved from an Apache httpd server to a full fledge transactional container, a similar maturation all middleware vendors went through.

It also explains one of the key reason of its sucess: Senior management involvment.

In an e-mail exchange with eWEEK, Trimble added that other factors leading to the success of WebSphere included, “The senior management team was directly involved, in a critical way, by closely managing the interactions between nascent businesses like WebSphere and the rest of the company, ensuring that the WebSphere could leverage IBM’s massive assets without getting destroyed by quarter-to-quarter hit-the-numbers imperatives. And IBM invested steadily in WebSphere over 10 years, even as the rest of the industry went through the dot-com boom and bust.”

It also describes what we have seen for a long time at JBoss: BEA was really the one suffering from JBoss, not IBM. This actually made a lot of sense. Early version of WS were pretty bad – which means that WS users were betting on IBM as large vendor, not on a “best of breed” product vendor. However, that wasn’t the case for BEA customers, which meant that as JBoss was maturing its offering (as of 2004), many BEA customers moved away to the new best of breed product, JBoss.

The article ends with a funny quote from Mills which shows IBM’s love/hate relationship with Open Source:

“Something of this class of software could never be free,” he said. In the mainframe world, IBM has delivered software as source code, but that is not likely to occur with WebSphere, Mills said.

Mr Mills, that’s a great marketing encouragement for your co-workers trying to sell Open Source based products…

Onward,

Sacha