LogicBlaze unveils open source SOA platform

LogicBlaze this week unveiled a stack of open-source products and support services aimed at helping enterprises develop and deploy service-oriented architecture (SOA) technology.

The LogicBlaze FUSE platform is available as a free download and combines open-source products from the Apache Software Foundation, including an enterprise service bus, messaging platform, persistence database, service registry and business process engine.

"We wrapped all these technologies into a common platform," says Winston Damarillo, who is chairman of Marina del Rey, Calif.-based LogicBlaze. "We took all the open source pieces, version-managed them, tested them and integrated them. Then we wrote additional technologies, such as the deployment kernel and a management console, to complete the picture." The entire package uses the Apache 2.0 license, Damarillo says.

Along with the platform, LogicBlaze offers support and maintenance services on a subscription basis through its Community-oriented Real-time Engineering (CoRE) network. Companies can choose between a basic CoRE subscription that costs $5,000 per year, per server and a premium subscription, which costs $10,000 per year, per server.

The premium subscription offers a higher level of response time and service level agreements, as well as indemnification for use of the technology. "If any of the software that's being used either infringes on a patent or is unusable for some reason, it becomes our job to write around the code and provide some financial protection for our customers," Damarillo says of the indemnification clause.

LogicBlaze's CoRE services include the usual maintenance and support options, such as bug tracking and access to key product developers. In addition, the services are designed to give users access to an engineering environment tuned to support SOA project development -- which is necessarily distributed, asynchronous and iterative, Damarillo says.

"You need a different kind of development environment for SOA, one that accommodates incremental additions and enables a quickly tested, rapidly stitched-together framework to assemble multiple services. And it needs to happen in real time," he says. CoRE subscribers can use LogicBlaze resources to manage some of their backend work, such as storing code, integrating multiple pieces of contributed code, and testing and releasing code.

Building a business around open-source software and services is not new to Damarillo, who founded Gluecode Software in 2001 and sold it to IBM last year. GlueCode offered services and support for an open-source middleware stack including an application server, database, portal and business process management engine.

In fact, Damarillo has made business of such bundlings. He is co-founder and CEO of Simula Labs, which is part venture fund, part operating company. Its mission is to commercialize open-source development via companies such as LogicBlaze.

Simula spawned LogicBlaze about a year ago. The idea was to create a platform that provides a broad SOA stack, including not only products for orchestrating, transforming and routing XML transactions but also tools for designing and executing business process flows.