I have been asked to research the advantages/disadvantages the two application servers, but am new to the space and am having a terrible time finding an unbiased comparison of the two platforms.
I understand that this is a broad question and I hate that I can't give a very specific use case (other than it will be an implementation in an organization with out a full time admin dedicated to management and it will be running in a mixed environment against JD Edwards/Oracle and SQLServer).
Does anyone know of any (recently published) content that does a reasonable comparison or can any offer any insight into which might be the better choice and why. Any help would be greatly appreciated.
[disclaimer, I'm from IBM, so I certainly can't be objective.]
I don't envy your position. Not only is the space complex but vendors continues to extend and refine their platforms. Arms-race purchasing needs to be avoided (today vendor A has feature X, so buy A ... wait vendor B has now got X and Y, buy B!). To some extent you are taking a view about the long-term relationship you'll have with the vendor, and the confidence you have in their future.
The Gartner magic quadrant reports might be a starting point. I fear that all they will really tell you is that both vendors have some good stuff.
In your position I'd really want to get some very specific use-cases and verify that you can actually implement them. I would also look at the pricing models for your particular platforms, that may be as important as the technical differentiators.