IBM is preparing an aggressive upgrade offer to tempt users of
BEA WebLogic to use its rival WebSphere middleware
platform.
The company is hoping to attract users disillusioned and
confused about the future of WebLogic, now that the product is
owned by Oracle.
"We will absolutely go after BEA and Oracle users," said Marisa
Shumway, director of WebSphere Application Server." She claimed
that unlike BEA WebLogic, the IBM product was cheaper, easier to
use and supported more programming languages and offered backwards
compatibility."
IBM has not released specific details of the offer but IBM
consultant
Prolifics is offering an 80% reduction in its services and one
week's free consultation for WebLogic users spending $£5000 or more
on IBM WebSphere software.
IBM has also refreshed its SOA product family with WebSphere
Application Server, WebSphere MQ and WebSphere MQ File Transfer
Edition, to attract BEA users.
Shumway said the products would finally allow businesses to
reuse code, a promise she acknowledged the industry has never
really delivered on.
"We have talked about reuse for a long time in the IT industry
but we are finally seeing real again now." As an example,
Shumway said, "We have fine-tuned and optimised our SOA family
so that applications consume less power and require less processing
power." As well as lowering electricity bills in data centres
Shumway said IBM's SOA products can lower software licence fees,
because they require less procssing power.