Who’s On Phirst

Like it or not, you have a heterogeneous environment. You are using a variety of OS’s, hardware architectures, databases, you name it. And, it’s proliferating. As companies continue to seek the best bargain for their IT purchases, they are more willing to use a different technology in order to stretch a dollar.

We’ve seen this shift for some years now with open source software. Companies that are in need of a database for a specific application are less likely to purchase more DB2, Oracle or SQL Server licenses and more likely to build the application using MySQL. The same can be said for Java middleware. At Phurnace, we have seen a large portion of our customers moving from WebSphere and WebLogic to open source alternatives such as JBoss or Geronimo.

Typically, these decisions are being made by internal development groups or by the companies’ external vendors. For example, we are good friends with two software vendors in Austin that have migrated their applications to support JBoss exclusively. Thus, they provide their customers with a complete stack and not just the application.

For internal development groups, the decision to build their application on an open source alternative to WebSphere or WebLogic is driven by economics and ease of use. Typically, the development group does not have the resources nor desire to use a non-free middleware platform.

The danger here is caused by lack of experience within the IT organization tasked with managing the application and its middleware platform. First comes the challenges of learning how to manage a completely new application. In turn, this is compounded by learning a completely new middleware platform. Often, determining if the cause of an application failure is due to inexperience with the middleware or the application itself is near impossible.

For this reason, we support JBoss, WebSphere and WebLogic. Our customers have the ability to manage existing middleware configurations and application deployments and can use the same tool they are familiar with to manage all of the platforms. Or, even better, this can help with their migration from one platform to the next.

Simply put, Phurnace wants you to be successful with your application server middleware choice, regardless of what you choose. Don’t worry. You won’t hurt our feelings when choosing one platform over another. We support the three most popular today and will be adding support for more.