Q&A Part 2: BEA's Chuang on competition, Linux and open source

Computerworld - ORLANDO -- At BEA Systems Inc.'s annual eWorld conference this week, CEO Alfred Chuang spoke with Computerworld about the application server market space, his company's competition, recent trends toward Linux and the open-source software movement. This is the second part of a two-part interview; the first part was posted yesterday (see story).

Everyone talks about application servers becoming a commodity. What are your thoughts?
I wish it was a commodity. I think there's a perception in the marketplace that commodity is bad. So far in the software arena, everything that has become a commodity has driven tremendous adoption. Microsoft Windows is a commodity, but nobody relates commodity to not making money in their case.
I think it's just a philosophy thing. Do you want to have mass proliferation of a technology? If you want to do that, then whoever is providing that technology has to make it a commodity. I think BEA is doing some significant [work] to make part of our technology a commodity. If you look at our [WebLogic] Express product, which was announced recently, that's $495 per CPU. It's cheaper than most desktop software. It's cheaper than Microsoft Office Standard. With our free Dev2dev subscription, you can literally develop your own very powerful, dynamic Web site, commerce Web site, for $495.
How can your company thrive when others such as Microsoft Corp. and Sun Microsystems Inc. are building or including their application server technology with their operating systems?
I think having the market recognize that the application server, especially the J2EE [Java 2 Enterprise Edition] application server, has become the standard in the marketplace is a great thing. People have discovered that nothing coming from Microsoft has been free. I am a Microsoft customer, and I don't expect that it will be free. It's just that the point of being charged is going to change. To combat that, you have to have a very smart pricing strategy to really know how you can provide the most value to the customer. ...
So far, if you look at our financial performance, our adoption in the marketplace, the number of users on Dev2dev, the number of licensed seats that we have sold, the number of customers that we have, how many we're adding, we're heading to the right direction. But there's still a disparity between the potential of the enterprise computing field and where we are. ... BEA will have to do more. I think we have to be even smarter in pricing. ... We have shown the world