Oracle today announced it was cited as a leader among the select companies that Forrester invited to participate in its March 30, 2005, Forrester Wave: Application Server Platforms, Q1 2005. The new report, written by Forrester Vice President John Rymer, assesses the state of the application server platform market and evaluates how the vendors stack up against each other. Oracle was one of only two companies that received leader status, delivering a leading industry application server platform for building and deploying composite applications. Oracle scored well against a broad set of criteria with Oracle Application Server 10g achieving the highest rankings in four individual categories including: Availability and Reliability (4.4); Administration and Management (4.6); Standards and Interoperability (4.3); and Cost (3.4). Working from its independent labs and using vendor research, Forrester developed 300 criteria to evaluate the application server platforms that include application server, integration server and portal server capabilities in a unified architecture to make it simpler to develop, deploy and manage composite applications. Using the Forrester Wave methodology, vendors were evaluated based on three overarching categories, including current offering, strategy and market presence. "Oracle has a surprising range of functions for composite application development and management, as well as a surprising degree of integration between the components of its application platform suite. Oracle scored high on all of the Forrester Wave's Current Offering criteria but had particularly strong administration and management features, compared with the other vendors. Oracle's costs are also comparatively low, and the company has dramatically expanded its market presence during the past two years," stated John Rymer, vice president, Forrester Research in the report. According to the report, a growing number of companies are moving toward buying complete platforms to be used as the foundation for composite applications, as well as more traditional business applications. Application server platforms can be deployed by companies to extend their current development environments. For this reason, Forrester expects customers to increasingly require integrated platforms to meet the needs of these various applications. "The results from Forrester's Application Server Platform Wave further support Oracle's continued effort to provide our customers with the most cohesive platform, which weaves our application server, portal server and integration server into a complete end-to-end middleware solution," said Rick Schultz, vice president, Oracle Application Server, Oracle. "We are especially pleased that Forrester recognized Oracle's capabilities for building and deploying composite applications, which are increasingly becoming essential to enterprise architectures."