-snip-
>I know that, you know that, but I work at a large corporation where policies
>are set by people who either have never worked in IT, or have quit a long
>time ago. They do think that way (why else do iPlanet, Oracle and Weblogic
>still sell strong?).
>Not that you should increase price (though some do it) of course, your
>client base will likely take a while longer to include the really large
>companies.
-snip-
generally agree with inexpensive != bad BUT i think there is a tendency
towards simplifying things a little too much. haven't used IPlanet but as
far as weblogic is concerned you DO get excellent documentation, lots of
tools/certified third party products, worldwide support partner network,
official support for verisign certificates, a product that has undergone
very rigorous testing in lots of different software/hardware environments
(anyone knows that the concept of "it's all java therefore it works on any
platform" is only half the truth in an imperfect world with buggy VMs and
OSs), clustering and http(s) tunneling that has been used extensively in
production and that's at least part of what you pay for with those prices.
even if orion has the better architecture and the more talented
architects/developers you cannot make up for all of this stuff that easily
if you don't have the manpower (which I presume evermind doesn't). don't
get me wrong. I think orion is an outstanding product but it clearly has
some weak spots compared to some major players which it makes up for by the
price, standards conformance and good architecture but it is a trade-off
and everyone have to make their decision based on what they think is more
important. if you have a websphere application server (no matter how crappy
it may be) running on an as400 for an online banking application and you
get performance/stability problems and you are a key account for ibm they
fly in a specialist for exactly that platform/software combination it noone
else can solve the problem. you simply cannot get that level of support for
orion, no matter how much money you pay. people who need that simply cannot
be advised to use orion (yet), period. If you can live with that (which we
luckily can), you get a very good j2ee platform for an unbeatable price.
that's the deal.
regards,
robert
(-) Robert Kr�ger
(-) SIGNAL 7 Gesellschaft f�r Informationstechnologie mbH
(-) Br�der-Knau�-Str. 79 - 64285 Darmstadt,
(-) Tel: 06151 665401, Fax: 06151 665373
(-) [EMAIL PROTECTED], www.signal7.de
