A 4-year-old company from India is looking to make a dent in the U.S. application server market.
Pramati Technologies on Tuesday announced what it says is the industrys first independently developed app server that is compatible with J2EE (Java 2 Enterprise Edition). In beta now, Pramati Server Version 3.0 should be generally available by Jan. 1, said CEO Jay Pullur.
At the same time, Pramati—which is based in Hyderabad, India, and has U.S. offices in New York and San Jose, Calif.—also is rolling out Pramati Studio 3.0, an integrated development environment for developers looking to build applications on J2EE 1.3.
Pullur and his brother, Vijay, who is co-founder and chief technology officer of Pramati, said the company is hoping to take advantage of the consolidation of U.S. application server vendors over the past year to make inroads into the market. Right now the company is best known in India and Asia.
“There is now only a few viable players—less than a half-dozen—who are providing app server technology,” said Jay Pullur.
The company is taking particular aim at the midmarket, which the Pullurs said has been underserved by the giants in the application server market, including BEA Systems Inc., with its WebLogic Server, and IBM, with WebSphere.
One way of doing that is by offering Pramati Server 3.0 for less than $10,000, as compared with the $15,000 or more for BEA and IBM servers, said the Pullurs. Pramati also is offering the server and tools at the same time, which should increase the servers attractiveness, they said.
Vijay Pullur said Pramati Server 3.0 takes advantage of the significant enhancements in J2EE 1.3, which Sun Microsystems Inc. released in September. Key among those enhancements is the use of EJBs (Enterprise JavaBeans), Java Server Pages and Java Messaging Service, all of which the Pramati server supports.
For example, the server includes an EJB Version 2.0 container, with support for such enterprise-level features as load balancing, failover and hot deployment. There also is support for transparent clustering, which provides greater performance and scalability.