December 2nd, 2008
Springsource releases Tomcat appliance
Today’s release of an Enterprise Tomcat server by Springsource is one more bit of evidence that customers want commitment from open source suppliers they sign checks to.
By turning a Java server into an enterprise product, Springsource offers innovation large companies want, and gains more influence in the Tomcat community.
It’s also a good illustration of how open source competition can work, with SpringSource and RedHat’s JBOSS competing fiercely to add more enterprise capabilities to Java. This grows the language for everyone, even those who don’t pay.
The SpringSource moves also put the lie to critics who claim that it’s useless to build open source because others will undercut you on support contracts.
SpringSource acquired Covalent, a third party support outfit, early this year but has since put those people on to productizing new products, rather than extending any third party branding.
Peter Cooper-Ellis, Senior Vice President of Engineering and Product Management, said “You can buy Tomcat support from a number of different people” but turning out products like ET TC Server “will ratchet that to another level.”
NOTE: I misheard Cooper-Ellis on the product name. It is the Enterprise Tomcat Server but they’re calling it TC, for Tomcat, rather than ET, for Enterprise Tomcast. My apologies for the error.
Here’s where ET TC Server is innovative, he said:
“There are three major categories of features – operations, diagnostics and enterprise packaging.
“In operations, you can deploy across a group of servers. You’ve got those management capabilities.
“In diagnostics it’s about finding what happened when things go wrong. We’re adding deadlock protection, create a dump when there is a deadlock, enter and exit tracing, so it’s easier to diagnose problems in development or in production.
“Then we have the area of enterprise documentation.
Cooper-Ellis said the new server will be released next month at under $500 per CPU.
“It does everything you need for the majority of Spring-based Web apps, and it’s really good value. In contrast people pay 20-25% of list on their web app servers on an annual basis. We’re extremely competitive with that kind of pricing.”
Turning an open source product into an enterprise product line takes real commitment, but it’s the kind of commitment enterprise customers demand. In the manner of the old joke about breakfast it’s bacon, not eggs.
Dana Blankenhorn has been a business journalist for 30 years, a tech freelancer since 1983. You can follow Dana on Twitter. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
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