BEA vs.

JBoss
Product Analysis
April, 2003

Product Marketing

© 2003 BEA Systems, Inc. — Company Confidential

 Agenda

JBoss Claims
The Application Lifecycle: Framework for
Understanding Costs
Comparing BEA and JBoss
– The Facts
– Enterprise Application Servers (EAS) vs. Basic
Application Servers (BAS)

© 2003 BEA Systems, Inc. Company Confidential 2

 JBoss Claims

Higher Developer and Administrator Productivity

1 “JBoss is emerging as a standard development technology due
to its ease of use”

Strong Community Support Model

2 “Our level of support is unmatched in the industry as your
support engineers are the developers of your code”

High Performance, Scalability, and Reliability

3 “Jboss is enterprise ready”

Low Cost
4 “The best application server is free”

© 2003 BEA Systems, Inc. Company Confidential 3

 The Reality—High Costs over
the Lifecycle of an Application

JBoss
95% of costs are incurred
after the initial purchase
of software. As a result it
Total is critical that enterprises
Cost examine costs over the
BEA lifecycle of an application
and the costs of building
out multiple applications
over the long-term

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8
RASP

Security

Upgradeability
Administration
Integration

Org Standards
Purchase

Dev Support
Development

© 2003 BEA Systems, Inc. Company Confidential 4

 The Reality—You Require More
Than Just J2EE Capabilities
Unified Development Environment
(WebLogic Workshop)
Complete Platform
Data Application Offering
24x7 Enterprise Ready Support

User Integration Integration

Integration (WebLogic
(WebLogic Portal)
(Liquid Data) Integration)

Developer
Productivity
Workshop, EJBGen,
Builder, JBuilder Reliability,
Interoperability Availability,
Pluggable inside your Scalability Application
J2EE
environment
Standards for Clustering, high Server
portability performance

Security Administration
Interoperable and Mngmt., monitoring,
flexible easy configuration

Path to Linux
JVM based Intel
(WebLogic JRockit)
platforms
© 2003 BEA Systems, Inc. Company Confidential 5
 1. Developer Productivity:
The Facts
Consequences
Enterprises are forced to spend more upfront on specialized developers writing customized code while
absorbing the burden of downstream upgrade and maintenance costs
JBoss BEA
• Fact: Minimal developer community • Fact: Large developer community
– JBoss has at MOST 26K developers* – 540K developers (free dev seats)
– 75 paying customers – 14,000 customers
• Fact: Understood only by highly specialized • Fact: Simplified development model for all
J2EE system developers developers
– Require knowledge at source code level – Workshop brings J2EE to the masses
– Huge dependence on a particular – JBuilder, WebLogic Edition; EJBGen, integration
set of developers with leading IDEs for sophisticated developer
• Fact: Developer tinkering at the source code • Fact: Clear separation of application
level results in higher costs business logic and infrastructure
– Customizations dramatically increase maintenance – BEA is accountable; no proprietary customizations
and upgrade costs downstream that leave a huge burden on the company
– Leads to massive lock-in – Defined release and upgrade paths
• Fact: Lengthy development cycles • Fact: Shortened project cycles
– No partial application update or hot deployment – Fast server startup time, partial application update,
increasing development cycles hot deployments of EJBs and JSPs
– No J2EE standards compliance! – J2EE certified, standards compliance leadership
*Based on documentation sales
© 2003 BEA Systems, Inc. Company Confidential 6
 Proof Point: Customer Testimonials

“Pretty much all shops who are looking to build enterprise apps
are seeking Weblogic, Websphere etc. The J2EE standards mean
absolutely nothing to the recruiters: you either have experience
in the app server flavor (some even are version specific) they
have chosen or you don't. Experience on J2EE compatible app
server means little to them. My gripe is that after 2 years on
JBoss I find my skills in the J2EE app server job market count for
very little. Check the job sites if you don’t believe me.”

“Being in the job market with JBoss skills that absolutely no one
seems to be willing to pay for, I have begun to take the J2EE job
market claims with more than a pinch of salt. To summarize,
nobody wants just J2EE skills , they want WebLogic or
Websphere etc.”

Quotes from Developers on

TheServerSide.com

© 2003 BEA Systems, Inc. Company Confidential 7

*Based on documentation sales
 Proof Point: Customer Testimonials

“JBoss takes the J2EE standards as something between guidelines and

suggestions, really. E.g., with the classloader basically broken in 3.0, non-serializable transactions
and stuff like that, I really can't see them getting certified. E.g., let's say that several EJB applications (or
just several beans) are running on the same server, and each one was written by different people, using
different versions of the same library. (The one we first discovered the problem with was Electric XML, but
it happens with others just as well.) Well, the first version loaded is the one which will be used by all other
applications, instead of letting them use their own libraries packed in the EAR file. Basically "unified
classloader" simply sticks to the first class with that name which was loaded, regardless from where. In our
case, the servlet which used one version of Electric XML was stepping on the toes of an EJB which relied
on a whole different version, packed in its EAR file. That's not even only for libraries: if two app developer
teams (presumably from the same company) were to independently come up with the same a class name
(e.g., com.some_dot_com.util.NonThreadedCache) in their EJB's, those two apps couldn't run on the same
JBoss server, because of classloader conflicts. Basically deploying one application or bean can break
everything else running on the server. And while JBoss does offer a means to say "I don't want to export
my classes" (as opposed to the logical "I want you to try my own classes first"), it (A) causes any call from
such a bean to another to fail with an exception, and (B) it doesn't even solve anything unless _all_ ear files
on that server use that option. So, really, I'm not against JBoss or anything, I do find the idea of an open
source application server cool, but... they'd
do well to start actually complying with
the standard. I realize that making a fuss about how Sun oppresses them is more fun, but the
cruel reality is that at the moment they're doing worse stuff to the J2EE
standard than Microsoft ever did to Java.”

Quotes from Developers on

TheServerSide.com

© 2003 BEA Systems, Inc. Company Confidential 8

*Based on documentation sales
 Proof Point: EJBGen for Simplified
J2EE Development

• Enhances developer
productivity enabling
easy creation of CMP
bean, for example
• With JBoss, cannot
utilize power of CMP
because of
performance limitations,
let alone utilize
simplified development
tool
• BEA maximizes
developer productivity
for all developer types!
JBuilder, Workshop,
EJBGen, Builder, etc.

© 2003 BEA Systems, Inc. Company Confidential 9

 Proof Point: Workshop for the
Application Developer
Visual Development + Runtime Framework

Intuitive Visual
Development Environment
Iterative, “Write and Run”
deployment and testing

WebLogic Workshop
Run-time Framework

JMS EJBs JDBC

Standard Java
code with BEA WebLogic Platform 8.1
Java Controls annotations
…Or use
any tool or
IDE Java Web Service • Leverage all developers!
Java Page Flow • Order of magnitude
productivity gains
© 2003 BEA Systems, Inc. Company Confidential 10
 2. Developer Support: The Facts

Consequences
Building mission critical applications without long term, accountable support becomes a heavy cost burden
for the enterprise and adversely affects developer productivity
JBoss BEA
• Fact: Unaccountable Support • Fact: Accountable 24X7 Support
– Less than 30 individuals with – 300 person dedicated team working
availability dependent on user 24X7X365
groups—no accountability – 11,000 page award-winning
– 10 person Documentation team; documentation, 50 people
476 pages – 50 worldwide education sites offering
– Changes to source code leaves burden weekly training
on enterprise – Worldwide user groups, dev2dev
subscriptions, books, etc.
• Fact: Doesn’t support past • Fact: Predictable support policies
releases of code and EOL policies
– No support of past releases means that – True long term support through updated
applications break service packs and customer service

© 2003 BEA Systems, Inc. Company Confidential 11

 3. Integration: The Facts

Consequences
Customers will face considerable costs in not only trying to have JBoss interoperate with existing systems
infrastructures but also in purchasing and integrating an integration solution to extend applications
JBoss
• Fact: No guarantee of “write once run
anywhere”
– Jboss doesn’t matrix test on different JVMs,
DBs, OSs, Web Servers
– No J2EE compliance or standards testing
– Run only 1000 QA tests per release
• Fact: No out of the box 3rd party support
– Lack of interoperability OOTB with
3rd party systems and applications;
Lack of JDBC drivers!
• Fact: No extension path to portal or
integration
– High cost in purchase of and integration of an
integration and portal solution!
– No offering or concept of reuse across portal,
integration or custom development
BEA
• Fact: Guarantee of “write once run
anywhere”
– BEA has very well integrated QA process
with matrix testing and team of 50
– Clear J2EE standards compliance leadership
– Run 95,000 tests per release
• Fact: True interoperability
– OOTB integration with Mgmt., Sec., LDAP,
Web Servers, Messaging Buses, etc.;
1000+ ISV partner deployments
• Fact: Unified platform offering
– Integration, Portal, Workshop integrated
on Server utilizing single development
offering in 8.1
– Huge cost savings in code reuse across
all development silos

© 2003 BEA Systems, Inc. Company Confidential 12

 Proof Point: BEA Ecosystem
1000+ ISV
Applications

Application RSA, Netegrity,

Entrust Security
Web Server

Internet Apache, IIS,

iPlanet WebLogic
Oracle, DB2, Database
Server/JRockit
SQL Server
Browsers
PDAs Operating Windows, UNIX,
Windows System Linux, Mainframes
HP Openview, BMC, System
Phones CA Mgmt
HP, Intel, Dell, Sun,
Hardware etc.
Documentum, Content
Interwoven, Vignette Mgmt

• Interoperability within heterogeneous environments SAP, Siebel, Pckgd

Peoplesoft, etc. App
• Over 2000 SI, ISV, technology platform partners
• 540,000 developers MQSeries Messaging
• 14,000 customers
.NET Web Service Web
• 24X7 dedicated support Services
• Books, Developers Journal, Education, User Groups, Tuxedo
News Groups, Documentation, dev2dev online

© 2003 BEA Systems, Inc. Company Confidential 13

 Comparing Costs During
Development Phase
• Developing on BEA with Workshop drives at least 4-5x productivity gains as measured
by developer effort and costs per project
• Lengthy development cycles, need for system level programmers, high support costs
due to lack of infrastructure and tinkering at source codelevel, and lack of integration
testing drive high JBoss costs

Requirements
51 days, 5 developers*, $127K in developer
7500 lines of code costs* with JBoss
Detailed required with JBoss
design

Code/unit test

Integration test

System test 17 days,

2 developers, $29K in
Acceptance test 1650 lines of code developer costs
Deployment
using Workshop using Workshop
Days/project on JBoss Days/project using Developer costs Developer costs/project
BEA and Workshop on JBoss using BEA and
framework Workshop framework
* Level of effort estimates for a Web services-based integration project based on SI estimation model. Number of developers at peak during construction phase
© 2003 BEA Systems, Inc. Company Confidential 14
 4. Reliability, Availability,
Scalability, Performance:
The Facts
Consequences:
JBoss’s performance limitations require you to spend significantly more hardware dollars to achieve the
same performance results as BEA

• Real World Order Management Application at

Support for 10X the number of users. Fortune 500 Company
90% savings in hardware costs
• Benchmarked BEA WebLogic Server vs JBoss
350 on 2CPU Sun server
• Benchmark Results
300
– JBoss could only handle 30 concurrent users
250 – WebLogic handled 300-350 concurrent users

200 • TCO Implication

– Ten 2CPU servers running JBoss based
150 application to achieve what BEA did with one
2CPU server
100
– Every CPU avoided for performance and scale
50 requirements translates into $50k-75k per CPU in
annual data center cost avoidance – to achieve
0 BEA’s performance levels, one would have to
spend 10X the amount in hardware costs
JBoss 3.0 WLS 6.1 – Additional savings in ease of development and
deployment reducing application management life
cycle costs

© 2003 BEA Systems, Inc. Company Confidential 15

 4. Reliability, Scalability,
Availability, Performance:
The Facts
Consequences
Without truly robust clustering, performance, scalability and transaction capabilities enterprises cannot
ensure the reliable completion of business operations, especially in the event of failure
JBoss
• Fact: Unreliable clustering
– Limited stress testing
– Unproven scalable deployments; limitations
with use of IP-multicast
– Lack of cluster administration (no node
manager)
– In memory replication limited, lack of highly
available messaging, poor EJB clustering; no
JMS, JDBC, HTTPSession clustering
• Fact: Unreliable transaction support
– No transactional logging so cannot recover
transactions in case of node failure
– Lack of distributed transaction support;
no distributed locking mechanisms
– Lack of performance enhancements—
no distributed caching
BEA
• Fact: Unmatched clustering technology
– Large cluster configurations deployed at
thousands of customers worldwide
– Rigorously tested through dedicated team
– No single points of failure – clusters can run
through local node managers
– Web clustering, object clustering
(EJB, JSPs), JMS clustering, JDBC pools,
IMR, etc.
• Fact: Protects transaction integrity
– Support for distributed transactions and 2
phase commit
– Ensure the transactions are completed or
rolled back as necessary
– History of leadership in transaction support
with Tux

© 2003 BEA Systems, Inc. Company Confidential 16

 5. Security: The Facts

Consequences
Customers will not be able to leverage their existing or future security investments while spending valuable
dollars creating and maintaining inflexible security policy
JBoss
• Fact: Lack of interoperability
– Lack of plugins for major security vendors
resulting in expensive integration costs
• Fact: Inflexible and hard to administer
– Proprietary standard (JBossSX)
– Security policy must be hardcoded into
business logic increasing development time
and cost
– No central administration
BEA
• Fact: True interoperability
– Easy pluggable in to leading third party or
legacy security providers through standard
interfaces
• Fact: Powerful and flexible security
framework
– Separates application logic from security code
enabling easy policy changes by administrators
– Reduces development and maintenance costs
– End to end security for WebLogic server hosted
applications
– Default security services out of the box

© 2003 BEA Systems, Inc. Company Confidential 17

 Proof Point:
Powerful and Flexible Security
• Security Framework • Security Policy Manager
– Takes security policy out of – Admin defines security policies
application logic – Admin defines the rules/
– Increases app security while entitlements
reducing development and – Minimal security programming
maintenance costs required!
– Increases Security policy
flexibility
– Plug into existing security
architecture
Authorization Role User
Principal Manager Manager Credential Portal
Administrator Auditor Manager

Security Framework

Authentication Credential
& Identity Authorization Auditing Role Mapping Mapping User Profile
Module(s) Module(s) Module(s) Module(s) Module(s) Module(s)

© 2003 BEA Systems, Inc. Company Confidential 18

 6. Administration Costs:
The Facts
Consequences
JBoss requires specialized, more expensive developers to administer the product occupying valuable
developer time for basic troubleshooting
JBoss
• Fact: Administration for Developers
– Requires advanced J2EE knowledge to
understand inner-workings of containers and
source code
– Requires code to configure databases, security,
clusters
– Custom coding required for interoperability
• Fact: Huge Difficulties in Trouble
Shooting
– Poor error messages; weak logging – 2-3X
longer to troubleshoot
– Lack of monitoring capabilities to detect node
failure
BEA
• Fact: Superior Diagnostic and
Configuration Capabilities
– Basic NT experience required!
– Out of the box web-console functionality
– Easy to use configuration wizards; configuration
time cut by 80%
– Option for sophisticated command line admin
environment
• Fact: Fast Problem Detection and
Resolution
– Whole application view and diagnostics from
central console
– Real-time cluster management and monitoring

© 2003 BEA Systems, Inc. Company Confidential 19

 Proof Point:
Administrative Productivity

• Fine grained
administration
• Simplified cluster
configuration/
management
• Zero-install
GUI console
• Interoperable with
third party tools
• Monitoring at the
JVM level

© 2003 BEA Systems, Inc. Company Confidential 20

 7. Upgradeability: The Facts
Consequences
Upgrading becomes an extremely costly process because of customizations that occur early in the
application lifecycle and constant release cycle
JBoss
• Fact: No backward compatibility
– Changes to core container code from
X.X.X release to X.X.X+1 release
– Tied to current version with lack of
eventual support in the long-run
• Fact: Large downstream cost effect from
tinkering with source
– Customizations of app server code make
maintenance, upgrades, and migrations difficult
and costly
– Applications become very tightly coupled with
the application server
© 2003 BEA Systems, Inc. Company Confidential
BEA
• Fact: Defined backward compatibility
statement
– Application migration since 6.1 has been
extremely easy
– Defined migration tools and services
– Strong migration story to low-cost hardware
solutions through JRockit and Intel
• Fact: Separation of source code results
in reduced downstream costs
– BEA is accountable; no proprietary
customizations at source code level that leave
a huge burden on the company
21
 8. Organizational Standards:
The Facts
Consequences
JBoss does not enable companies to establish organizational standards that promote reuse, increase
productivity, and lower cost
JBoss
• Fact: Companies forced to build and
maintain their own infrastructure
– Infrastructure much more than just J2EE
– Security, administration, monitoring frameworks
that are not reusable and only accessible by
specialized developers
– Infrastructure in the hands of internal specialists
• Fact: JBoss Group is a struggling
services company
– No financial stability; lives on service contracts
– Only 30+ paid developers who spend half
their time on development and half on services;
No scalability
– 3 version released since 1999; 75 paying
customers
– SUN on record to potentially sue JBoss for
license violation
© 2003 BEA Systems, Inc. Company Confidential
BEA
• Fact: Established best practices that
are reusable and supportable
– Reusable security, administration, portal,
integration, etc. frameworks built on best practices
and supported
– Proof: Toshiba completed second portal at 8% of
original cost, 1/10th dev. resources, 40% faster
– Utilize skills of entire organization
(app developers with Workshop, NT
administrators, J2EE specialists)
• Fact: Proven “bet your business”
infrastructure
– 14,000 customers; accountable
product company
– Building since 1996, 8 versions released
– Unified platform offering
– Powerful ecosystem of ISVs, technology
partners, and support network
22
 Enterprise Application Servers (EAS)
vs. Basic Application Servers (BAS)

JBoss

Long term Enterprise Application

cost Server (EAS)
• J2EE
Total • Leading RAS,
Cost security, perf.
Short-term
BEA • Medium to high volume
Basic cost trans. intensive, mission
Application critical applications
Server (BAS) • Integration capabilities
• J2EE • Upgrade to platform
• Departmental or suite (APS)
medium scale • Easy to use development,
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 deployment, management,
applications
security tools
RASP

• Basic
Security

Upgradeability
Administration
Integration
Dev Support

Org Standards
Purchase

Development

integration to • Support infrastructure and

databases or large developer base
Web services
• Basic RAS
capabilities

© 2003 BEA Systems, Inc. Company Confidential 23

 BEA’s Complete Product Offering
for All Phases of Development

WebLogic Portal
WebLogic Integration

Basic App Servers Enterprise App Servers

WLS
Premium

WLS
Functionality

Advantage

WLS
Workgroup

JBoss
WLX
TomCat

Enterprise Requirements
© 2003 BEA Systems, Inc. Company Confidential 24
 dev2dev Subscriptions Pricing
(US Pricing Represented)

Trial Free Development Seats!

Edition (12-Month Extended Evaluation @ Download Center)
(Free) http://inweb.beasys.com/is/distribution/forms/marketing_order.htm

Platform Replaces WebLogic Platform SDK

Edition (Delivers everything you need, straight to your door!)
($850)

Tools
Edition Complete J2EE Development Solution
($5079) (Adds JBWE & 12-Month Software Assurance)

© 2003 BEA Systems, Inc. Company Confidential 25

Appendix

© 2003 BEA Systems, Inc. — Company Confidential

 Summary of Total Cost
of Ownership

JBoss 3.x BEA 7.0

Developer Costs
Required Expertise Highly skilled J2EE Skilled developer +
system developer (est. beginning J2EE
10% of J2EE dev developer (est 90% of
community) J2EE dev community)

Configuration Costs
Server Set-up 1-2 Hours 15 min. (5 click set-up)
Domain Configuration 3+ Hours—Multi-file, 5 minute configuration
hand-edits wizard

Deployment Costs
Deployment Descriptor Creation 2-4 hours, hand-edit 15 min—use Deploy tool
deployment descriptors to auto-generate dep
descriptors

Reliable Application Deployment 0-5 hours 10-20 minutes (2-phase

guaranteed deployment)

© 2003 BEA Systems, Inc. Company Confidential 27

 Summary of Total Cost
of Ownership (Cont.)
Hardware Costs
Simultaneous Users
JVM
Administration Costs
Required Expertise
Administration and monitoring
Problem resolution
Security configuration
© 2003 BEA Systems, Inc.
JBoss 3.x BEA 7.0
1x 10x
None bundled Jrockit optimized for Intel
architecture
Advanced J2EE Basic NT experience
knowledge
Requires custom- Out of the box web-
development via Mbeans console functionality
5+ hours requires trial 15 minutes—server
and error isolation health status and node
manager
Created in app code by Use of policy editors by
developers administrators saves
50% time
Company Confidential 28
www.bea.com

© 2003 BEA Systems, Inc. — Company Confidential