posted by avanabs on April 28, 2010 11:23 AM

I've recently been working my way through a number of whitepapers from IBM and Oracle...a seemingly endless task. These guys must have more prople writing whitepapers than building the products.

In any case, one of these whitepapers, a 2009 Oracle WhitePaper discussing the DOD's large scale use of Open Source, was really interesting for two reasons. First, Tomcat is without a doubt the major factor for Open Source utilization at the enterprise level. Secondly, Oracle uses the term "Blended Source" in this whitepaper to describe today's combination of Open Source and commercial products.

Nostalgic (and Whistful) Note...feel free to skip: A few years back, in the "BO" (before Oracle) days and while BEA was still a major force in the JEE Application Server market, some of us at BEA developed a product initiative sponsored by Peter Cooper Ellis, BEA VP Engineering...one of BEA's more visionary, and successful, executives. The BEA concept was dubbed "Blended Source" by Marge Breya, CMO. I was Product Manager for the initiative and Eric Hsiao led the development team, including some of BEA's best WLS engineers. 

"Blended Source" resulted from finding out how BEA's best and largest customers were really using our products. It was really simple...most of our customers were already combining the best of Open Source (Spring, Tomcat, Hyperic, etc) with BEA's Tuxedo and WLS server products to create a "blend". The opportunity we found was that each and every customer was investing in custom tooling and management to piece together these technologies. Customers were enthusiastic about BEA taking over that responsibility and ready/willing to pay for support subscriptions.

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