IDC has reported that IBM is the worldwide leader across the key middleware areas of application servers and integration suites with a market share of 37 percent. In 2004 the application deployment market software market grew 6% to reach nearly $6.9 billion in software revenue, according to IDC. BEA and Oracle trailed IBM with about 11 percent and 7 percent market share, respectively.

Last week IBM announced Q2 '05 earnings and reported that WebSphere is one of the fastest growing areas in IBM’s $15 billion software. With 18% growth in Q2 '05, WebSphere has grown revenue in each of the last 28 quarters.

Earlier this year IT analyst group Gartner reported that IBM expanded its number one position in overall application integration and middleware market share to capture 37 percent of the global market. The next closest competitor was BEA, with 7 percent of the global market share.  Oracle and Microsoft came in with 4 percent each, according to Gartner, which predicts that the marketplace will grow to $7 billion in 2005.

At the heart of WebSphere lies the WebSphere Application Server. An application server is the software foundation on which developers write applications and integrate the Web-based applications with the back-end information that sits on servers.  Through its work with the developer community, IBM also continues to build its network of 1.1 million registered WebSphere developers by enabling them to work with a broad range of platforms based in open standards. In addition, more than 7,000 independent software vendors write applications on top of WebSphere and is the preferred J2EE platform for leading application software vendors.