Thanks for info.
The server doesn't have any hibernate jar.
Can somebody give a list of jars which I should use in my pom.xml. I looks like there is a conflict with jars.
Since Hibernate 3.6 you don't need to add Hibernate Annotations as a separate jar, the classes are merged in core (and the old ones are not compatible).
I removed Hibernate-annotations.jar from the POM, and no exception anymore when tomcat starts.