With the release of Glassfish v.3 on top of JEE6, Oracle is back in the driver’s seat with Java….they have overtaken Red Hat as the core community behind developing ease of use features for developers, customers, and ISVs, so that the ecosystem of JEE will naturally find more benefits in working with Oracle to port to both WebLogic and Glassfish, something that JBoss simply cannot offer, nor can SpringSource, nor can SAP, and especially not IBM, even though they offer Geronimo…. Geronimo is a failure, it has no traction in the marketplace, and IBM appears reticent or incapable of porting the entire suite of WebSphere product family to Geronimo, thus preventing them from being a major player in Java opportunities where Global Services does not have a strangle hold on the account…thus, its time to consolidate more and sell out Red Hat to IBM…its the next logical step and more sense than an IBM-SAP merger as JBoss is still going strong, and IBM would be able to go to customers, ISVs, and developers and give them one tool or one set of products that run on both WebSphere and JBoss natively, with better support for broader application server platforms….. This leaves a three-tier marketplace lining up against Microsoft via Oracle, IBM, and SAP, with the possible emergence of Google in to the enterprise space, supporting the write-once-run-anywhere value proposition that is the ONLY way you beat Microsoft….no single company can do it in an account that is weighing Java v. .Net, it needs to be the entire community involved from preventing the entire enterprise space going to .Net over time….nothing Guice, Intel, or Java vendors can do on their own to prevent .Net from just getting perfected with Great Plains programming, and so it is time for IBM to step up to the plate, fork over a couple billion and buy Red Hat…. They need to get fully verified as a true Java vendor, even if it is controlled initially by Oracle, their arch-enemy, they need to see the bigger picture and secure more accounts for Global Services, while getting the only real Linux platform on the market….eventually Oracle will need to develop a true open source Linux community rather than just copying Red Hat, but until that time Solaris, Ubuntu, etc….just are not capable of competing with Red Hat, even considering Oracle’s reach…its JEE6 on Linux all the way to the final confrontation with Microsoft which will happen over the coming decade….first, though, IBM and Red Hat need to respond to the overwhelming come-from-behind victory of Glassfish…. In no way should Sun’s hardware be $7B valuable, and considering the margins are coming down for Oracle, it has to come from somewhere, and considering the MySQL hang-up in Europe, there has to be some reason why Oracle sticks it out with Sun, and the answer is Glassfish, all respect and responsibility to the WebLogic/Fusion staff as they have an ERP job to do, but in the Java space, its Glassfish all day every day….they have perfected the application server while welcoming Spring in to the fold, no other company or rather community could have done it but Sun’s Glassfish community, and they did it…. Ease of development, ease of use, ease of support, and an ecosystem as an alternative to JBoss, it is simply the most successful application server of the past 3 years, and is probably best assumed to be the leading candidate for dominance and potential Google use in their wiggle in to the enterprise space….sure, they’ll build their own application server, and work with Spring, and customize for Chrome, but Glassfish still intrigues, and Oracle has it, its now in a home that is not going away anytime soon, and thus generates customer assurances that can be backed up by the Oracle Database cash cow and maintenance revenue…. Glassfish is here to stay, JBoss is here to stay, WebSphere is here to stay, and WebLogic is here to stay, now what in that equation do you think stands-out as the next logical move in the industry….if i had money to burn on stock, it would be in Red Hat, because IBM needs to pay that premium and get the next best set of assets in-house, there is no second-place worthy of consideration, even, again, SAP, it is Linux JBoss, and that will give them wide-ranging room in enterprise accounts against Microsoft… IBM v. Oracle with joint progress on JEE, thats a battle we have been waiting for for too long, it is time to get it on, and see what shakes out of that healthy competition….let Google get bogged down in a Microsoft war for the time being, while Java lives free as the development platform of choice for the enterprise….. lots of money, there….. Java