CA, Wily and Round Two of the Applications Management Battle

CA announced last week that they were acquiring Wily Technology for $375 million. I have to admit that when I first saw the announcement, my reaction was, "Wait a minute, CA is where old software goes to die, what is Wily (the leader in the business of managing J2EE applications in production) thinking selling themselves to those dinosaurs?" Then I listened into the analysts call and actually had a chance to talk to some of the executives who are involved from both companies. As a result of that conversation, I came away impressed with the commitment of CA's new management team to break with the past patterns of angering customers. I also realized that given who Wily competes with (IBM, Symantec/Veritas/Precise, Quest and Compuware) being able to leverage CA's 2500 salespeople and their customer base might just be the best strategy for Wily to continue leading the J2EE Applications Management market, and continuing on its torrid growth path.

It is the realization that the best path for Wily to continue to lead the J2EE Applications Management Market was for it to become part of a much larger and more entrenched company with a much broader product line, that leads me to the conclusion that something fundamental has now changed about the Applications Management Market. If you are talking about managing J2EE based applications in production (things running under Weblogic, Websphere, JBoss, etc.) this war is over from the perspective of startups, early adaptors, venture capitalists and people like me who make their money helping small companies be more successful. This is now a business where big companies go to one of a small number of vendors all of whom are selling a broad product line complemented by a broad set of services. Another way of looking at this is that Gartner has had a "Magic Quadrant" on this market for over a year, and by the time Gartner publishes one of those on a category, you can be pretty sure that the opportunity to start a company from scratch to attack that market is long gone.

So, where does that leave the rest of the Applications Management Market? First of all, what does the rest of the market consist of? Well it pretty much consists of the following groups of applications. There are several large vendors of line of business applications for which good Application Management still does not exist. For example if you are running SAP, Siebel, Oracle, etc. in production any pieces of those applications that are not J2EE are still black holes and management nightmares. The massive world of Windows applications remain largely unmanaged in production as well. This is a particularly hard problem because Windows applications have been built in so many different ways that one approach to managing them cannot work. So there are point solutions by applications type, which makes for lots of niche vendors and lots of confused customers. Microsoft is focused upon .Net since Microsoft knows that if .Net does not succeed, they will have lost the war for production applications platforms with the J2EE camp. Finally, Citrix Systems continues to gain traction with its method of centralizing the delivery of applications. However, once you use Citrix for its centralization benefits you compound your applications management challenges.

So, we are just going to have to see where the next category of interesting applications management solutions comes from. My bets are on .Net and Citrix for two very different reasons. .Net because it promises to be the next great thing from Microsoft and that always attracts entrepreneurs and venture money. And Citrix because it is just a big enough niche to get some smart entrepreneurs started in a market with big pain and little competition.

Bernd Harzog
CEO
APM Experts
bernd.harzog@apmexperts.com