Executive Summary
The competitive study assembles material published in the last four years from IBM, Oracle and Red Hat sources. From these sources, the summary identifies 10 capabilities considered as critical for web application servers and ranks the three competitors based on their current offerings. Though the IBM and Oracle offerings are currently more mature in key enterprise production capabilities as administering complex multi-node and multi-data center constellations and raw performance, the Red Hat offering is architecturally more modern and more conducive to supporting the wide range of application types including monolithic, microservice and hybrid. The Red Hat offering also has the distinct advantage of being the platform for the CA Identity Suite Virtual Appliance as well as the preferred platform for all three members of the CA Identity Suite: CA Identity Portal, CA Identity Governance and CA Identity Manager.
The following table enumerates the critical capabilities considered as critical for web application servers and provides the competitive ranking of the three vendors. Where applicable, comments substantiate the ranking.
Provider and Comparative Ranking |
Capability
IBM WebSphere and WebSphere Liberty Profile
Oracle WebLogic
Red Hat JBoss / Wildfly
Comments
Software rank and market share
1
2
3
Reference the Competitive Comparison (Slide 2) attachment in Appendix A.
Fully featured Java EE 7 Profile Support
IBM supports the EE 7 Web Profile and the Full Platform Profile but with multiple product offerings.
Oracle supports both but not as a subset. The Full must be installed.
Red Hat supports both the Web Profile subset as well as the Full Platform Profile with a modular code base.
Equivalent functionality in administrative tool support and feature parity for on premise and cloud instantiations
IBM offers different administrative tool support for its WebSphere and WebSphere Liberty Profile products.
Oracle offers parity for its two instantiations owing to the fact that they are both VM-based.
Red Hat provides equivalent functionality by including specific code for clustering supporting the administrative tool prevalent for the given environment.
Integrated administration and management capabilities
Reference the Competitive Comparison (Slide 38 -48) attachment in Appendix A.
Monolithic, microservice and hybrid application architecture support
IBM supports architectural variants with different product offerings.
Oracle supports deployment options but the lack of modularity in tuning the server resource footprint limits the number of microservices that can be deployed on any given computing resource.
Red Hat supports all three architectural variants.
Development tools for continuous integration and continuous delivery of applications including source to image (S2I) support
IBM offers a diverse set of tools for its WebSphere and WebSphere Liberty Profile products. These differ as well from other tools for use with other IBM middleware products.
Oracle offers JDeveloper for development across the entire Oracle middleware portfolio. Red Hat offers various integrated tools for developing and deploying any type of Java application.
Support for complex (multi-node, multi-data center) configurations (including clustering and disaster recovery)
Reference the Competitive Comparison (Slide 48) attachment in Appendix A.
Performance comparison based on enterprise criteria
Reference the Competitive Comparison (Slides 25 – 30) attachment in Appendix A.
Integrated problem determination and health management
Reference the Competitive Comparison (Slide 57) attachment in Appendix A.
CA Identity Suite Support
CA Identity Portal supports Oracle WebLogic and Red Hat JBoss EAP / WildFly.
CA Identity Manager supports IBM WebSphere, Oracle WebLogic and Red Hat JBoss EAP / WildFly.
CA Identity Governance supports IBM WebSphere and Red Hat JBoss EAP / WildFly.
The majority of the production deployments are based on JBoss EAP / WildFly.
The CA Identity Suite Virtual Appliance is based on JBoss WildFly.
Reference Appendix B.