BEA chief Bill Coleman has declared that Microsoft's .Net initiative has already lost the battle for the enterprise to Java.

"When .Net is here in a few years and it owns the low end, the enterprise will be gone," said Coleman, chairman and chief strategy officer at the enterprise application platform software vendor.

Speaking at BEA's London E-Business Seminar last week, Coleman predicted that there would soon be only two enterprise development platforms, based on implementations of Java 2 Enterprise Edition (J2EE).

He praised Microsoft for its web services initiatives and said that internet services were the future of application to application communication, pointing out that the use of adapters and connectors was an expensive and unproductive approach.

Coleman added that the fat client-server model had simply complicated systems while IBM's WebSphere, a rival J2EE implementation, was complicated to use.

".Net is a brilliant strategy for controlling the desktop, but [soon] there won't be a desktop [in the enterprise]," he explained, adding that Hailstone and Passport, which were the .Net keys to locking in users, were actually causing users to hold back.

Coleman also previewed project Cajun, a new product entering alpha testing that is designed to speed J2EE application development.

He stopped short of calling it an integrated development environment (IDE) and said it was not a competitor for IDE partners such as WebGain and Compuware JBuilder, leaving delegates intrigued as to what it would actually offer them.