Most white papers and webinars available on the Internet about choosing enterprise middleware focus the selection process around criteria such as licensing costs, technical coverage of long lists of specified functionalities, and vendor viability. While these criteria may have been suitable in the past, the experience of many enterprise architects leading J2EE projects over the past few years suggest that they are not enough.

What’s missing? People costs. “People costs” include a wide range of factors that promote—or prevent—IT staff productivity: availability of information around the application server platform or development environment, simplicity of the middleware platform, accessibility to the software, and quality of technical support, among others. These factors should gain more weight in the strategic selection process because they impact total cost of ownership as much as, and in some cases more than, license and ongoing support costs.