White is "even more offended" by Optaros' decision to give the competing Xen virtualization technology higher marks; it got 3s for both maturity and enterprise readiness. "Now Xen is a great, new technology, lots of promise, but a maturity of 3?" White said. "All I can imagine is that Optaros has an expertise in Xen and is trying to hawk that expertise, which means I don't see how this report can have a scrap of credibility."

OpenJMS' Anderson said he was "surprised" by Optaros' list of AJAX programming tools, which he said left out worthy tools such as Echo2 and Google's Web Toolkit.

Von Rotz acknowledges the criticism, but he said it's not in Optaros' interest to boost weak software just because it wants to offer it to clients. "We don't favor tools because we use them; we use them because we think they are good," he said.

He also defended the guide against accusations of being overly reductionist, saying the goal is to give time-pressed IT managers and CIOs something akin to a city map to help them "navigate" through countless unfamiliar, oddly named applications. Von Rotz also pointed out that higher marks for functionality don't always mean the software is better for the end user.

"We feel that a lot of our customers are overserved by the features in commercial products, and could live with much less in many cases," he said.