Red Hat sets JBoss assault on middleware market

Red Hat Wednesday stated a seven-year goal to own 50% of middleware deployments using JBoss to anchor platforms for portals, service-oriented architecture, and application servers and services.

The company plans to whip up interest via an initiative called Enterprise Acceleration that will include physical and virtual labs that let independent software vendors and customers test their middleware products. The labs will focus on such things as performance testing, interoperability, migrations and obtaining certifications.

JBoss did not announce any new products as part of the strategy saying those details would come later this week in Orlando, where the company is hosting its annual JBoss World conference.

"We have never really defined the board portfolio of products we have and intend to have," said Craig Muzilla, vice president of Red Hat's middleware business, during a press conference in Orlando to announce Red Hat's initiative. "You can begin to think about this as reference architecture for open source middleware in an organization."

Muzilla also said that Red Hat's goal is to own 50% of the middleware infrastructure marketplace in deployment by 2015 using JBoss products.

Last week, new Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst said he plans to lift the company onto the billion-dollar revenue level in the next three years, an effort that will require more than a 100% increase in current revenue levels.

The pronouncements by Muzilla and Whitehurst clearly signal that Red Hat intends to make a serious bid to become a middleware powerhouse.

Red Hat spent $328 million in 2006 to acquire JBoss, a move that began to widen the company's focus beyond its core operating system -- Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

The middleware move is Red Hat's second attempt after an earlier home-grown project called Jonas never attracted a thriving user base.

Red Hat says its middleware initiative is grounded in three areas: development tools, software and management via its JBoss Operations Network.

The development tools include the JBoss Developer Suite, including the Eclipse IDE, integrated tooling and a runtime platform.

The software area is divided into platforms for portal, SOA and applications. It also includes MetaMetrix Data Services Platform. The MetaMetrix Designer tool will be added to the development tools options.

Red Hat in April 2007 acquired MetaMatrix, a platform for integrating disparate data source into Web-based applications, to plug a major gap in its middleware stack.

The platforms include not only the JBoss Application Server but specific frameworks and projects coming out of the Red Hat and open source communities.

For example, the application platform includes the application server, the Seam framework for creating Web 2.0 applications, and the Hibernate framework that provides a high performance object/relational persistence and query service.

All the platforms are outgrowths of the current JBoss Enterprise Middleware Platform, which provides a common set of open source tools to create a foundation that supports software components and applications. It is a similar build-out model Red Hat uses with its operating system.

The platform includes the JBoss Enterprise Application Platform, a stand-alone offering that runs on Linux or Windows and the similar Red Hat Application Stack, which comes bundled with RHEL 5. The platform also includes the JBoss Enterprise Portal Platform.

As far as the Enterprise Acceleration program, Muzilla said Red Hat has yet to establish any labs, but the direction is clear.

"Enterprise Acceleration is transforming IT from legacy and client/server to a more modern architecture -- SOA and Web 2.0. It is also a movement away from monolithic Java-based platforms to something that is much more dynamic and flexible," he said.

Muzilla said over the next 12 months Red Hat would be building on the concept, but had no specific announcements around software or services it was developing.