Three experts are better than one. And in the recent webinar Demystifying J2EE Performance and Architecture, ebizQ served up a trio of industry luminaries who cooked up super-sized portions of valuable advice about J2EE environments.

JNoel Associates Principal Jasmine Noel began the presentation, which was part of the Best Practices for IBM WebSphere Software series, sponsored by Candle Corp.

She set the table by putting recent IT trends in context, observing that companies are now competing globally, against ever-increasing competition, so they have to be as flexible as possible to efficiently drive new products and services to market. At the same time, they’re under constant pressure to keep costs down.

Ironically, “Flexibility and cost-efficiency put very different demands on the computing environment,” Noel noted. “Flexibility requires technology to change as the business changes. But for IT operations, cost-efficiency comes through automation and optimization. And those require some sort of steady state in the infrastructure.”

So how does IT deliver on both needs? The answer, Noel suggested, “is what’s driving all the innovation that’s taking place right now, on multiple levels.

“At the hardware level, we have the whole on-demand, adaptive computing, real-time enterprise movement, affecting how and when capacity is allocated. At the software level, we have more standards-driven application architectures.”

And Noel reported that research reveals J2EE fitting into that whole mix: “There’s quite a bit of survey data available showing J2EE does deliver the business flexibility that it promises.”

She said, based on an analysis she did of available data, about a-third of enterprises are rolling out new J2EE apps at least every-other month, and “a large majority” are upgrading their existing J2EE apps with the same regularity. What’s more, businesses are buying smaller footprint servers, and clustering them for performance and scalability. Also, “Everyone is at least investigating Linux as an alternative to keep costs down.

“So what we have here is two infrastructure trends at the same time: J2EE for flexibility, and those smaller servers, increasingly running on Linux, for cost-efficiency.”