Enterprise IT decision making

I am an enterprise architect, and it’s sometimes a challenge to balance making the right technical choice with the right choice.  David Chappell talks about this in the context of Open Source J2EE.

I’ve gotten some interesting comments from readers of my latest column in Application Development Trends. The major complaint is that I didn’t give enough weight to the role that open source J2EE technologies like Tomcat and JBoss play in this market, describing it instead as controlled by IBM and BEA

He puts this down to the fact that:

My perspective is very focused on enterprises, the people who control the large majority of IT spending. In this world, there’s some use of open source J2EE technologies, but it’s a definite minority. There are vastly more applications running on WebSphere and WebLogic, and so viewing this market as dominated by these two is accurate

Of most interest though is how he characterises the Open Source community:

In most of my interactions with open source advocates, including this one, the arguments I hear tend to be rooted in a purely technical view of the world. This probably reflects the strong technical orientation (they’re developers) and relative lack of experience (they’re young) of the traditional open source fan. It’s not surprising that they don’t understand how enterprise IT decisions are made, since they’ve not usually been involved in making them. From a purely technical perspective, open source J2EE looks pretty good. To a typical enterprise decision maker, however, WebSphere and WebLogic are still better options.