[Zope] Zope vs. the Big Boys

Jeff Miller Jeff@TheJeffMiller.com
Mon, 20 Aug 2001 22:42:29 -0500


This is really more about how you make decisions than anything else.

A couple of years ago, I was CIO at a venture funded "dot-com" startup
company. We were well funded and pretty savvy. I decided to go with IBM
Web Sphere for our core e-commerce package. Why? Lots of reasons: 1) IBM
was able to bundle hardware, software, professional services and
FINANCING in a single package. 2) We were able to get a staff of IBM
folks on site pronto to jump start the project. 3) I knew my board of
directors wouldn't bat an eye if I told them I needed to spend $1.5
million on the site if it was with IBM, but they would be nervous as
hell if I told them I was going open source.

On the other hand, if I were putting together a new architecture today,
I would almost certainly elect to go with a 100% open source model. I
believe the offerings have matured to the point that these are stable,
business solutions, and the community of free and paid support options
has reached a critical mass such that a responsible CIO can go open
source and not worry about killing the company.

At the end of the day, these decisions are not made on the basis of
"which is better". They are made on the basis of "does any of these
alternatives have an intolerable downside risk". That is a far more
important consideration.

You didn't say, but if you are looking at J2EE servers, be sure to look
at JBoss.

Jeff

Robb Allen wrote:
> 
> Honestly, how does Zope compare to some of the big names such as BEA and
> WebSphere? My company is looking at spending a lot of money in the
> Application Server realm, and I wondered how Zope stacks up against them.
> We're two shakes of a pen away from purchasing something, and I'd like to at
> least come back with an open-source solution just so that we can compare
> something.
> 
> Fire away. I need as much ammo as I can get (although, honestly, I'm leaning
> towards BEA)