Wednesday June 03, 2009

We have been using multiple metrics, such as downloads and registrations, to measure GlassFish adoption, all of which you can check out at The Aquarium.  For example, GlassFish has been the most downloaded application server for quite some time, and is a leading indicator of what can happen further down the road.

Down that road, another metric is to measure the adoption of an open source project by other open source projects.  Because "open source" projects have source code publicly available, it is possible to automate the gathering of data/metadata for open source projects, which offers non-subjective evidence of adoption.  Ohloh (recently acquired by SourceForge) has been doing just that, by crawling 38,000 projects across 3,500 source forges. With the support of Ohloh, we have been able to measure the adoption of GlassFish within open source communities.

The results are in with this report, and GlassFish adoption has shown continued within open source communities.  In fact, the first graph shows that GlassFish is now the most targeted application server among open source projects, with over 50% of those projects supporting GlassFish.  The second graph (below) shows that new projects target GlassFish a stunning 73% of the time, far surpassing any other application server. Note that in both cases, projects can support more than one application server, hence the results total more than 100%.

The results of GlassFish adoption is apparent when you consider the growth in monetization of GlassFish. While Sun does not break out GlassFish Enterprise Server in our earnings reports, GlassFish is contributing to the growth of software infrastructure at Sun, and is a leading indicator that shows that the future opportunity looks bright for GlassFish Enterprise Server. 

Tuesday March 24, 2009

For me, it's Ground Zero for EclipseCon, 2009.  I wanted to get an early start to post about the GlassFish Tools Bundle for Eclipse, but it looks like Ludo beat me to the punch.  I was slowed down a bit by the fact that I forgot to pack toothpaste, which does not exactly mash well with booth duty. No worries, the hotel lobby personnel had my back, so my breath is minty fresh :-)

Sooooo, Sun is announcing the GlassFish Tools Bundle for Eclipse, which bundles community editions of GlassFish v2.1 and GlassFish v3 Prelude, Eclipse 3.4 (with Web Tools Platform), GlassFish Eclipse plugin and optionally JDK 1.6.  In addition, we've included the Java EE Javadocs, so you get Java EE API auto-completion.

Here are some notes about the bundle I think are worthwhile to mention:

• The GlassFish Tools Bundle for Eclipse v0.9.9 is not quite FCS yet. Great quality, but we have a few motions to go through for a 1.0 release.  We're doing everything we can to get to 1.0 as quickly as possible.
  
  
• The GlassFish Tools Bundle for Eclipse is *extending* the reach of GlassFish into the Eclipse community. In the past, developers had to pull together too many pieces (above) to get an Eclipse-based GlassFish environment.
  
  
• To preempt the tinfoil hats, GlassFish will continue to ship with the award winning NetBeans IDE. In fact, check out this video Adam Bien's presentation at Community One East on the NetBeans 6.7 with GlassFish v3 Prelude. 3 slides and a ton of code.
  
  
• If you are interested in using GlassFish with Eclipse, the GlassFish Tools Bundle for Eclipse is the quickest way to get there.  Eclipse is pre-configured (err, pre-integrated) with GlassFish, including log file viewing, http monitor, and more.
  
  
• With GlassFish v3 Prelude, Eclipse developers don't lose HTTP session state when their application is re-deployed. Developer lifecycle simplified to edit-save-refresh browser. Keeps your mind on the problem, not the tool!
  
  
• With GlassFish v3 Prelude, developers get an early look at Java EE 6 APIs, including JSF 2.0 Early Access and EJB 3.1 Lite Early Access (both in the Update Center).  JAX-RS is final and fully supported (also in Update Center).
  
  
• The GlassFish Tools Bundle for Eclipse supports Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X. No worries, OpenSolaris is coming.
  

Tuesday March 17, 2009

I do like to see bloggers post a pic of themselves on their blog. Just in case I run into one of 'em at a trade show.  However, I've always been bugged at personal portrait pictures on blogs, articles, etc that are waaayy out-of-date. I swear that PR folks never updated the Scott McNealy pic during his tenure as CEO. To each his own, I suppose.

The pic I had on my blog was about 6 years old, which made me a target of my own criticism. I kinda liked that pic, though. Fresh hair cut. 165lbs. 36 yrs young.  No signs of bald spot.

Today I decided to update the pic. What a difference 6 years makes!  42 years old. Less hair to cut (barring nose/ears). 20lbs heavier. A newly forming bald spot is racing my receding hairline to the top of my head (my money's on the bald spot). I'd swear my nose is 2mm (.005%) longer. I could go on. And on. And on.  However, it's me. Uncut and raw. The real deal. Dagnabit, I'm diggin' it.

I've been thinking about updating the pic for a while, when I finally saw one that made the grade.  A bit too "visionary-looking" for my taste, but the alternatives weren't as promising - such as me in Las Vegas with a ... (never mind) or at the beach without a shirt (Vegas pic is way better).

Stay tuned for 2015.

Tuesday February 10, 2009

Busy, busy day. Lots of news regarding Sun GlassFish Portfolio in general, and  Enterprise Manager in particular. I will in no way try to keep up with Nazrul on Enterprise Manager blogging :-)

I have spoken with countless customers about GlassFish Enterprise Server over the last 18 months (such as T-Mobile and TravelMuse), and it's no surprise common threads appear, such as cost reduction, avoiding vendor lock-in, and support for the latest standards (sooner). The concerns customers have with products based on open source center primarily around support and the ability to troubleshoot production issues.

Regarding support, GlassFish Enterprise Server subscribers have access to 24x7 support with live call transfer for high priority ("production down") issues. In addition, Platinum support offers a Customer Advocate who understands customer deployments, resulting in faster problem resolution and escalation management. However, a Customer Advocate also acts in a proactive manner via regular meetings to keep up with customer environments and issues, and can work with customers on practices to avoid downtime.

To address concerns with visibility into production deployments from a product perspective, Sun is  introducing Enterprise Manager with GlassFish Enterprise Server v2.1 (and GlassFish Portfolio). I'll reiterate Nazrul's coverage of Enterprise Manager, which is a good one-stop shop that covers the improved manageability and observability features.  Of particular importance is the ability to avoid downtime in the first place with various alerts and log file management.  We expect many enterprise customers will have enterprise management tools in place. For these customers, SNMP monitoring support is key. A really helpful feature that is generally JDBC pool management.  JDBC pool management is essentially "auto pilot" for JDBC connection pool optimization. Turn it on and, odds are, you will get better performance with less overhead.

If you get a chance, check out Nazrul's Enterprise Manager post and feel free to give us feedback. We look forward to it!

In case you haven't viewed the Q2FY09 quarterly earnings announcement, both MySQL/Infrastructure software and Niagara-based servers are growing strong. Sun doesn't break down the numbers to specific products, but the revenue shows that a growing number of customers are coming to Sun as they build out their web infrastructure.

As for GlassFish, I go home each day with a smile on my face knowing that GlassFish Enterprise Server is contributing to that growth with many new customers.  Calendar year 2008 delivered roughly 9 million downloads, and over 300,000 registrations. Registration is optional, so we do our best to earn it. Feel free to use the GeoMap to view the growth. While I am continually and pleasantly surprised by these numbers, I can't help but feel we are only getting warmed up as our virtual team - both Sun and non-Sun - continues to grow.

All this being said, we are not resting on our laurels. Nope. Too much on our plate in order to continue earning new customers. We're listening.  What do you like about GlassFish/Sun/community? How can we improve GlassFish/Sun/community?  Feel free to contact me directly, or use the GlassFish user's email alias to provide feedback. Other routes to feedback include the The Aquarium blog, FishCAT (GlassFish Quality community), GlassFish.TV,  Twitter, and the plethora of GlassFish community bloggers (too many to list).

Tuesday January 13, 2009

Two recent high availability mediacasts, the GlassFish Clustering screencast and the recent GlassFish High Availability webinar (and companion whitepaper), have done well (IMHO).   To quickly summarize, the screencast covered download, setup, and validation of a GlassFish cluster. The webinar covered architectural approaches to deploying GlassFish clusters in a virtualized environment.

The screencast hit > 1,500 views in total (YouTube + Sun Learning Exchange). Time well spent on my part, I think. Hopefully it was time well spent on the viewers part as well.

As for the webinar, over 1,000 registered to attend the webinar, hundreds attended, and hundreds are viewing the replay. Lots of questions occurred during the chat, and some business relationships were formed in the process.

Me-thinks we've addressed a bit of pent-up demand on GlassFish High Availability.

Wednesday December 24, 2008

Sssooo many things have happened with GlassFish in 2008, I was a bit hesitant to write this blog in fear of missing something.  Then again, I'm not known for being a shy blogger. These are not in an order of importance or priority, just rolling off the top of my head in my "brevity is not an option" blogging style.

1. Adoption. GlassFish adoption is through the roof. Were still counting, but somewhere near 9 million downloads and 300,000 product registrations. Exceeded my expectations. That's more than one download for every Java developer!? Me-thinks that developers are trying to stay current with latest versions.  Feel free to track GlassFish adoption using the GeoMap or on The Aquarium.
   
   
2. JRuby on GlassFish. Quite popular thanks to the work by Jacob, Arun, Vivek, Charles, Thomas, and others. No doubt this is contributing to GlassFish adoption. GlassFish in the twittesphere and the blogosphere quite active.
   
   
3. Customers.  Quite a bit of commercial interest in open source in general and GlassFish in particular.  Customers like the innovation and transparency, not to mention the flexibility of "paying at the point of value" that open source enables. Follow our growing list of customers here and here.
   
   
4. GlassFish Performance. It's an understatement to say that GlassFish performs well. It is hands-down the fastest open source application server. I've seen many customer benchmarks comparing GlassFish to closed source application servers, and GlassFish has either met or exceeded the competition. When price is thrown into the equation, customers begin to ask themselves "Why am I currently paying up to $50K/CPU for my closed source application server?"
   
   
5. FishCat launched. Proof that open source innovation does not have to be limited to lines of code. Check out the contributor list that are constantly improving GlassFish quality.
   
   
6. GlassFish v3 Prelude.  For early adopters, this is a fully QA'd and supported release of GlassFish layered on an OSGi mickrokernel, with some nifty developer productivity features. While this release has a slightly different feature set than GlassFish v2, it'll eventually be a superset of Glassfish v2.
   
   
7. GlassFish on UStream. Eduardo launched an ongoing series of interactive community sessions on various topics, by both Sun and non-Sun community members. Active Q&A.
   
   
8. GlassFish Updates. While originally targeted for January 2008, GlassFish v2 UR1 was actually released *early* and pulled in to December 2007. Mid-2008 we released GlassFish v2 UR2 with bug fixes and performance enhancements. GlassFish v2.1 isn't far around the corner with additional bug fixes and performance improvements.
   
   
9. OpenMQ Updates. OpenMQ has been cruising along with it's latest 4.3 update. Highly peformant. Scalable (*really* scalable). Highly available. Bundled with GlassFish.
   
   
10. GlassFish ESB released. GlassFish ESB is Open ESB in commercial form. Supported. Feature rich. Java Business Integration support at its core.  Layers right on top of GlassFish. NetBeans Integration. Learn More.
    

Tuesday December 23, 2008

Jason has posted a couple of blog entries (here and here) on spiffing up the GlassFish admin console. We do get a *LOT* of positive feedback on the GlassFish administration console, both in feature-richness and ease-of-use. Jason and team are off to make a good thing even better, so feel free to provide feedback or ideas of your own to the team.

You'll see on these threads that I'm a bit of a party pooper. Jason and team have delivered a great console that a lot of folks like, and I worry that making too much of an improvement may interrupt those who feel comfortable with the existing console.  Please provide feedback to Jason and team. The more the merrier.

Monday December 22, 2008

After taking a look at Tom Daly's post on compelling price/performance, I thought I would take a slightly different approach. Tom's post covers the details of the recent 100% open source software result of 1197.1 JOPS@Standard using GlassFish, OpenSolaris and MySQL running on a Sun X4150 Server. The competitive results are also on quad-core X64 servers.

The data shown here includes 3 years of 24x7 phone support for each operating system, database, and application server.  This provides a more appropriate scenario for those deploying in a production environment. While Tom's post has the raw data, I'm just showing the updated $/JOP.

Required disclosure : SPEC and SPECjAppServer are registered trademarks of Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation. Results from www.spec.org as of 11/05/2008. 2xSun Fire X4150 (8 cores, 2chips) and 1xSun Fire X4150 (4 cores, 1 chip) 1197.10 SPECjAppServer2004 JOPS@Standard; Best result with 8 cores in application-tier of the benchmark: 1xHP BL460c (8 cores,2chips) and 1xHP BL480c (8 cores,2 chips) 2056.27 SPECjAppServer2004 JOPS@Standard; Best result with 2 systems in application-tier of the benchmark: 2xDell PowerEdge 2950 (8 cores, 2 chips) and 1xDell PowerEdge R900 (4 chips, 24 cores) 4,794.33 SPECjAppServer2004 JOPS@Standard.

MySQL Pricing: https://shop.mysql.com/enterprise/
Oracle Price Book: http://www.oracle.com/corporate/pricing/eplext.pdf
Red Hat Server pricing: https://www.redhat.com/apps/store/server/
Sun OpenSolaris, GlassFish Enterprise Server pricing: http://tinyurl.com/SunSoftwareVolume

Tuesday December 16, 2008

I love to watch boxing. Big. Fan.  That's why when I read Sacha's post on open source business models - which questioned Sun's business model around GlassFish -  the first thing that came to mind was a boxing analogy. When you hit someone hard and they smile as if to say "You didn't hurt me", well, you've hurt them.

Sticking with the boxing analogy, Sacha's watched one fight tape in a GlassFish career that is racking up many wins. His post reflects having incomplete information. It's true, by the way, that Sun offers unlimited deployments of GlassFish for $25,000 - or should I say starting at $25,000 for organizations under 1000 employees.  When replaying the rest of the tapes, one can see that we have a tiered approach not all that different from the Java Enterprise System. The primary differences are that we group employees into tiers (to align with MySQL Enterprise Unlimited), and that the offering is for a single product instead of a multitude of products. Of course, GlassFish & MySQL Enterprise Unlimited makes a nice one-two punch. As for software infrastructure @ Sun, it's grown year over year.

Based on competitive intelligence, I know that JBoss offers site licenses as well, but it's unclear to me if JBoss/Red Hat has part numbers and dollar figures committed for an all-you-can-eat subscription. I can say that Sun puts a stake in the ground and assign a part number and dollar figure to an unlimited subscription - a commitment to the customer up front. How much are *you* paying for a JBoss Enterprise Application Platform site license?

Now to address Sacha's free training point, and to extend the boxing analogy well beyond its usefulness and probably effectiveness - Don King. One of the roles of a fight promoter is to drive attendance and revenue.  Regarding free training, it's a marketing promotion. Marketing has a budget, and we spend it as wisely as possible to drive maximum awareness and product adoption. Sporting events often take this approach to drive attendance.  When I attended a Chivas game recently, I wasn't too concerned about their long term viability when I got a free hat. Delivering free online training in a promotional context isn't going to break the bank. The content had already been created, after all. In fact, thanks Sacha for linking to our free glassfish training offer. As for any revenue "lost" to free training, we don't think quite that two-dimensionally. We're more than making it up when customers learn of the the strong value proposition of running GlassFish Enterprise Server on CoolThreads servers (a billion dollar business in-and-of-itself), and backed by the newly introduced Sun StorEdge 7000 Unified Storage system.

GlassFish adoption is through the roof, both in downloads and registrations. I personally like to take a look at the GlassFish GeoMap upon occasion as a reward for all the hard work that has been put forth by Sun and the GlassFish community.  I can emphatically say that this success is being followed up with a rapidly growing number of GlassFish Enterprise Server subscribers who value the support and service Sun provides.

To sum it up, when I see a blog post ending with "Sun being desperate" and "hail mary", I see a competitor trying to instill Fear, Uncertainty, Doubt - FUD.  That means the competition is smiling (errr, smarting) after they've been hit pretty good.  Me? I stay away from FUD and prefer to stick to the facts.

Wednesday December 10, 2008

As a side effect of being product manager for GlassFish, I've had to give up quite a bit of hands-on Solaris time. However, I've had the time to get OpenSolaris 2008.11 up-and-running in VirtualBox. Good stuff, and great job! I really look forward to trying out Time Slider. In the back of my mind, I'm wondering how this can be utilized for GlassFish configuration version control. In fact, me-thinks I'll try it out.

Saturday December 06, 2008

As we add features to GlassFish over time, one characteristic we do not want to compromise is ease-of-use. With this screencast I wanted to show how easy it is to set up a GlassFish high availability cluster.  While other clustering screencasts exist, I wanted to take a different approach. How long would it take, from download to deploying an app, to get a GlassFish high availability cluster up and running? This screencast does just that. While I could have gone faster - faster connection, eliminate narration, etc - I wanted to make it more typical and meaningful for viewers. Here's a summary of the timing:

• Download: 2 minutes and 30 seconds. I cover this time by describing bringing up a slide and describing the clustering architecture
• Installation and cluster setup: 4 minutes, 30 seconds.
• Verifying and testing cluster by deploying a sample application: 3 minutes

Note, the embedded video is via the Sun Learning Exchange. This video is also posted to YouTube.

Update: You can play these video's in full screen. On YouTube there is a "Watch in High Quality" link just under the video (to the right) as well.

Friday August 08, 2008

I've been in the Washington D.C. area the past few days extolling the virtues of GlassFish to the America's sales force. The good news is that the GlassFish session, an 8:00am affair, was packed. I must say that I was pretty darn surprised. Sales reps have *dozens* of products they can focus on, yet GlassFish drove a full house (60-70). Here's why:

• Customer pain.  These days we often hear the phrase "pain at the pump" to describe how we feel about rising fuel prices. It's no different for how customers feel about how much they are paying for license fees at a time when the economy is in question. Now is not the time to raise prices, it's time to be more responsive to customer pain.
  
• MySQL synergy. The business momentum behind the MySQL acquisition (inside and outside of Sun) is quite amazing. When you have a database, something needs to CRUD the data (I didn't know CRUD could be a verb either). When you have an application server, data needs to go somewhere. GlassFish and MySQL provide quite the one-two punch, without hitting below the financial belt.
• Open Source - as in Freedom. Not just financial freedom, but the elimination of vendor lock-in. Customers feel beholden to closed-source products.  Customers do not feel beholden to open source communities. Buy only when you need to. Eliminate vendor lock-in. Sales now realizes that open source is a facilitator, not a competitor, because customers still want 24x7 support to reduce risk and downtime.
  
• Transparency - Transparency facilitates trust. The GlassFish community is about as transparent as I've seen a community be. Sales enters an environment where a we have already established some level of trust and credibility. Their role is to extend that trust into a win-win business relationship.
  

Saturday July 26, 2008

When I was in sales, I participated in numerous Request for Proposal (RFP) efforts. To put it in perspective, I spent most of my sales career selling hardware to the government vertical (albeit as a software specialist). Governments are big on RFPs (impartiality). I also helped the commercial sales teams with RFPs upon occasion, so my peers suffered the same fate.

Product managers are not immune from RFPs. We tend to be back line support for those questions that need a bit more insight into the product (ex: roadmaps). Since being in product management I've noticed I'm involved in fewer RFPs. I can say with authority it's not because of a lack of commercial interest. GlassFish is doing quite well in that regard.

Customers are leveraging open source to reduce cost and eliminate vendor lock-in (among other things). Before the move, customers are still comparing, in the middleware space for example, GlassFish, JBoss, Geronimo, and Tomcat. I occasionally get comparison spreadsheets from potential customers. However, the process of the formal RFP seems to be pushed aside. Here are some of my thoughts as to why:

• Transparency. Open source is by definition "open". A vast majority of the information that is typically requested is publicly available.
• Google. The information that is public available is easily found.
  
• Community. The information that is not available can be quickly addressed by posting an email.
• Resources. Organizations do not like the RFP process. It's time consuming and people-consuming. Thank goodness because vendors do not like RFPs either - it is equally time consuming :-)
• Viral growth. Open source technologies often get deployed first at the departmental level. They tell two departments, who then tell two departments, and so on, and so on. Before you know it, the open source technology is already the company standard.
• Value Proposition. The value proposition of using open source in general, or a specific technology in particular, is often compelling enough to "sell itself". For example, GlassFish offers enterprise features, is 1/10th the cost of its closed-source peers, and outperforms them as well.
  

The blog title truly is a question, not a statement. I've thrown out some supporting thoughts, but I don't want to claim an authoritative statement. Regardless, I know it is not an absolute truth. So the question remains, has open source generally killed the RFP?

Tuesday July 22, 2008

In an effort to gain visibility in a world of information overload, the media invented the "ALERT". However, there seems to be no consensus as to what an "ALERT" means. The result is "The Boy Who Cried Wolf" syndrome, where an ALERT more often than not adds to the noise.

I made the mistake of subscribing to ZDNet mailing Open Source ALERT mailing list. Note to ZDNet, a post by Dana Blankenhorn is not worthy of an alert. That is not to discredit Dana whatsoever. I subscribe to Dana's blog. However, a daily blog post is not ALERT-worthy. I unsubscribed. ZDNet lost a communication channel to me, their customer.

Note that cable news is not immune, where they spend endless hours of analyzing a single topic. An ALERT is intended to notify the viewer of something eventful, although it rarely does so.

My thoughts on good vs bad alerts.

Good alerts - including mandatory Yahoo, Microsoft, Google, Apple references:

• Yahoo buys Microsoft
  Microsoft buying Yahoo lost its alert-ability months ago
  
• Google Trends shows googling Google on the decline
  Not that it will ever happen
  
• Microsoft places [anything significant] under an open source license
• Apple opens up iPhone to developers, and AT&T Unlimited data plan is really unlimited, enabling SlingBox owners to Sling.
  GlassFish & MySQL Unlimited really is Unlimited.
• Tsunami. Earthquake.

Bad alerts:

• Microsoft buys Yahoo
  See "endless hours of analyzing a single topic" above
• new iPhone model released
  "... endless hours ..." yada, yada, yada
• Anything about Britany Spears
  Alerts should be newsworthy
  
• Alien Invasion
  They're already here