IBM Cloud Pak for Applications vs. Microsoft Application Server (deprecated) vs. Red Hat JBoss Enterprise Application Platform

Well suited for customers who are looking for cloud-adoption, and finally to meet the challenges of business innovation for the competitive advantage through DevOps.

Incentivized

Microsoft Application Server has been incredible this past year during COVID. Previously I would have said that we could go without it, but after this past season, I’m glad we have utilized it. Without having this software set up prior to COVID, we would have been in a tough situation. I mention COVID a lot because we were able to continue our work almost seamlessly this entire year.

JBoss EAP is subscription based/open source platform. It's very reliable and great for deploying high transaction Java based enterprise applications. It integrates well with third party components like mod_cluster and supports popular Java EE web-based frameworks such as Spring, Angular JS, jQuery Mobile, and Google Web Toolkit.

Incentivized

• Provides a fantastic range of Application runtimes allowing the most suitable runtime to be selected for the app being implemented.
• After using Transformation Advisor for quite a while, it is an indispensable tool to help modernize, specifically from WebSphere and Tomcat, towards the lightweight, fast and efficient Liberty runtime.
• The simplicity of the licensing by wrapping many products into a single offering with a different VPC weighting.
• Allows us to modernize our runtime from WebSphere Application Server (or ND) to WebSphere Liberty core without sacrificing our WAS licenses.

Incentivized

• Microsoft Application Server has proven to be highly reliable and effective at deploying to all of its clients.
• Application performance is surprisingly good and responsive even in bandwidth-constrained environments and generally very reliable.
• All software programs are manageable from a single location, even when bandwidth is limited.

• MOD_CLUSTER integration. JBoss EAP integrates pretty well with mod_cluster. This is an intelligent load balancer especially useful in highly clustered environments.
• Supports enterprise-grade features such as high availability clustering, distributed caching, messaging etc.
• Supports deployment in on-premise, virtual and hybrid cloud environments.

Incentivized

• User Experience and Learning Curve
• Integration with Third-party Tools
• Pricing and Licensing Model

Incentivized

• Some security hotfixes and general release updates require restarts.
• We wish it supported more applications out of the box.
• Thin client support would be great for MS Application Server.

Incentivized

• Difficult to replicate configuration outside of a container environment
• Still requires quite a bit of knowledge of the CLI
• Integration with deployment tools requires CLI knowledge

Incentivized

We are planning to migrate away from Jboss to Tomcat as Jboss has shown not interest in supporting OSGi which is heavily used at our shop

Incentivized

I have found Microsoft Application Server to be incredibly easy to use. I have used dozens of similar programs and have always struggled to navigate through all the functions. So far I have been able to adapt and learn this software with ease. I rarely run into a problem that I wasn’t easily able to move forward on with a few tips.

JBoss overall is easy to use. The installation and deployment of applications are quick. Documentations and support are also readily available.

Incentivized

JBoss EAP is lightweight and doesn't really consumes much physical resources. It's high performing and suites well for high transaction Java enterprise applications. The out of box performance settings are not really great and you will have to configure the settings to suite your environment to leverage it's full benefits.

Incentivized

Stability is one of the first things we consider when evaluating software. MS Application Server has been rock solid and has reduced the time that our IT staff dedicates to maintaining our legacy applications.

Incentivized

Fast response.

Incentivized

Our customer mission-critical core banking applications like Temenos T24 run on best of the breed IBM WebSphere Application Server which is java based-application server. IBM has kept up the promise of providing support, fixpack, and any update. As far as I know, at least by 2030, IBM is committed to continue with WHE which gives customers confidence in their current investments.

Incentivized

It has a similar feature to what Microsoft Application Server has but at a greater cost and also having to deal with another vendor when we could use a full Microsoft Stack for better training and support.

Incentivized

We selected JBoss because of compatibility with EJB's. We currently are trying to reduce our footprint and will highly consider using Tomcat.

Incentivized

• We have been able to migrate apps away from the expensive WAS-ND to the more cost-effective WAS-base without throwing away our WAS-ND licenses. With a 1:4 ratio of WAS-ND to WAS-base we've been able to we've been able to save in excess of 75% on licensing charges for these apps.
• By having a license model based on VPC ratios (1:4:8 - WAS-ND:WAS-base:Liberty core) we've been able to move away from using license pooling resulting in over-allocating (i.e. wasting) CPU cores for each license pool, to using consolidated license pools hosting a combination of WAS-ND, WAS-base and Liberty-core. This has allowed us to reduce our licensing costs accordingly.

Incentivized

• Our ROI has been great since it has enabled our IT staff to have a central location to perform application updates which enables us to save time and money.
• Deployment is very easy since the internal applications that required constant updating are now updated in one central location.
• It's a lot easier to be within compliance protocols requirements.

Incentivized

• Jboss EAP is easy to deploy and configure. This lead to lower cost and faster delivery.
• Even though we have large number of machines running JBoss, we have only two Jboss Administrators. It doesn't requires too much administration and maintenance on daily basis and reduces number of administrators required for large implementations.

Incentivized