Goodbye, Geronimo? IBM says app server is alive and well

When IBM acquired Gluecode, many industry watchers saw it as the ultimate statement that open source was a force to be reckoned with in the SOA and middleware space. And, it was a smart move by IBM to embrace this new disruptive force that promised to bring SOA to underserved and unserved markets.

Joseph Ottinger just posted a tidbit over at The Server Side that suggests IBM may be letting the Apache Geronimo project -- which was productized as Gluecode, which became IBM's WebSphere Community Edition (CE) -- wither on the vine. (Apache Geronimo is an independent community project, but a number of committers are employed by IBM.)

"An anonymous conversation with a Geronimo user who's been paying close attention to Geronimo's development yielded an interesting statement: Geronimo's days are numbered. The reason offered was IBM's sponsorship, in which a large number of the Geronimo committers were hired by IBM, and for whatever reason, innovation ceased within the project."

I checked with Brenda Haynes, director of WebSphere open source strategy and development for IBM, about the allegation, to get a sense of what exactly is the depth of IBM's continuing commitment to Geronimo and CE.

Haynes said IBM is not scaling back on its commitment to WebSphere CE, noting that interest continues to run high among customers. "There’s a lot of data that suggests Geronimo is having fantastic acceptance and interest out there," she said. "The download rate is healthy and continues to grow.When Geronimo community released its [Java] EE5 support, the downloads really spiked.As the IBM team working on that, we’ve been thrilled to see the acceptance of Geromino, and continued growth of Geronimo."

Haynes also responded the question raised in Server Side about IBM scaling back on the personnel committed to Geronimo and CE development, stating that Big Blue continues "to have some of our best folks working on Geronimo. We have a commercial product based on that code base, and there’s no change in our strategy for us."

However, Ottinger speculates that IBM may be concerned about CE -- available for free download -- usurping sales from its commercial WebSphere Application Server editions.

Haynes brushed off this allegation, stating that IBM commercial app sales are doing fine, thank you. IBM saw more than 25 percent growth in app server sales from its commercial offerings, and if anything, CE helped drive interest in IBM's more sophisticated app server offerings. "We feel that Community Edition fits a very important part of our family story," Haynes said. "There are customers that are looking for a certain level of app server. The characteristics might be size, might be startup time, might be bells and whistles. Community Edition fits well for a number of customers that have specific application needs."

Ottinger states that with at least 19 out of the 43 committers working on Geronimo, giving IBM heavy influence over the project. He notes that if Geronimo's development "is being driven by IBM's business interests and not the community upon which it's supposed to rely, then its days are indeed numbered. All it will become is an 'also-ran' for IBM, a product from which IBM could use the best developers and ideas, while gaining the promotional advantage of Apache participation."

The future action within the SOA space is going to be within the underserved and unserved segments of the business market -- a majority of companies at this point. As this kind of disruption evolves, the vendors servicing the high-margin business continually get chased upstream. IBM's CE approach is an interesting strategy by a high-end vendor to capture at least some of the vast untapped future-SOA market, which will belong to the open source and commodity players.