IDC, Gartner Put New Numbers To App Server Market

By Richard Karpinski

BEA Systems and IBM continue to run neck-and-neck in application server market share, according to the latest numbers from Gartner Group and IDC.

The two research houses issued new numbers this week, joining recent market reports from AMR Research and Giga Information Group.

Last year saw growth in the app server market—which had been almost 100 percent year over year—slow to just 20 percent, according to Gartner. It tabbed the market at about $1.18 billion. Gartner credited the general slowdown in IT spending for the slowing growth.

IBM grabbed the most market share in 2001, growing from 22 percent to 31 percent. BEA stayed on top, bumping up slightly from 33 percent to 34 percent. Sun had a 9 percent share of the market, with the rest scattered amongst other competitors.

Gartner said the market was splitting into low-end and high-end segments, with IBM and BEA ruling the high-end, transaction-intensive portion of the market and Hewlett-Packard, Microsoft, and others delivering "good-enough, free technology" to go after the low-end of the market.

While HP and Microsoft might bristle at such a distinction, clearly basic application servers are becoming more of a commodity item than ever before. Just this week, Sun became the latest vendor to essentially offer an app server for free, bundling it as part of its Solaris 9 operating system.

Intriguingly, Gartner also defined what it calls an "application server platform suite," which consists of integration, application, portal, and edge server. In that market, Gartner said IBM led with a 33 percent market share, followed by BEA (24 percent), Oracle (12 percent), and Sun (7 percent).

For its part, IDC predicted the app server market would reach $4.4 billion by 2006, with significant new opportunities emerging for vendors as IT spending picks up. IDC said IBM and BEA continued to lead the pack, between the two of them generating just short of 48 percent of the market's revenues.