Stacey writes:

“Finally today we announced that Red Hat and Hyperic will be working together on the development of a common systems management platform.

……
As you know, back in 2005 was originally OEMed to create JON before the Red Hat acquisition. At the time, the software licensed was still closed and the software has not been upgraded since, rather JBoss and now Red Hat has been updating the software privately. The new project will update the software contributions from Hyperic to its latest software, contribute the additional code written by the JON team, and work jointly to create a roadmap of future features. And of course make it all open source! (GPL v2)

…….

This new open source project is meant to create a repository of common services to be used in future versions of Red Hat and Hyperic products. Both companies will work to maintain, govern and extend management capabilities within the new open source systems management platform project.”

Now, this is very cool news, and a great endorsement for Hyperic technology. The deal appears to position Hyperic as the de facto systems management provider for Red Hat customers. Choice is great, but it can sometimes work against OSS in the CIO’s mind.

The deal is also an endorsement of Red Hat’s community. Long-time readers may remember that I questioned the “endorsement of the JBoss community” when Exadel decided to move their development into the JBoss community. I questioned the endorsement because there had been funds exchanged, making this an acquisition rather than an endorsement of community A vs. community B.

This agreement, may lead to an acquisition in the future, but today, it’s about one independent company agreeing to join forces and communities with another independent company.

Kudos to Hyperic & Red Hat for making this happen.

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“Sales came in slightly higher than expected, with Red Hat reporting revenues of $127.3 compared to revenues of $99.7 million during the year-ago period. Analysts had expected sales of $125.7 million.

…

Over the past year, Red Hat’s shares have fallen more than 25% as the company has toiled to transform from a Linux vendor into a peddler of a broader array of software.

One big reason: Sales of the so-called application server software Red Hat acquired with its purchase of JBoss last year have disappointed. “The rate of JBoss bookings and revenue growth has not met my expectations,” said Szulik in a conference call with investors. “We know we can do much better.” “

Red Hat Linux is definitely firing on all cylinders. JBoss, in the words of Red Hat’s CEO “could do much better”.

Further comments via CNet:

“However, not all believe the JBoss deal is going swimmingly. Credit Suisse analyst Jason Maynard downgraded Red Hat from “outperform” to “neutral” Monday. “We believe our thesis of improved field execution and meaningful JBoss acceleration won’t materialize and deliver the anticipated upside to our forecast,” he said. “Our checks indicate that the organization continues to be in a state of flux as the company struggles through its transition to a multi-product company.”"

Here’s something I found funny via Reuters:

” Chowdhry of Global Equities Research said the prospects for JBoss were dim because its software was designed to work with the Java programming language. He said Java was losing market share as businesses embrace Ruby, a programming language that is easier to use and works with an open-source rival to JBoss known as Ruby on Rails.”

LOL. RoR is going to kill JBoss…Seriously?!?! If RoR is such a threat, why are other Java app server vendors “doing okay“? Is there something more here? (Hint: yes – I’ll get into it tomorrow).

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Not sure if the author, Henry Chesbrough mentioned that IBM made significantly more than $100m/yr in revenue as a result of its Linux investments, whether through increased hardware or services sales. And, we continued to drive revenue to AIX. This last point isn’t often covered, but the AIX business didn’t die.

Very few customers take a one-size-fits-all approach to their IT needs. So, yes, you may need AIX or Solaris or a System z for some of your applications. But you’ll also need some RHEL, SLES or Windows for other parts of your infrastructure.

Customers want choice. So when a new option in a given software category becomes available that saves money, time, is easier to use, etc., customers will pay attention. If IBM had tried to ignore Linux, customers would have satisfied their curiosity (initially) and desire for Linux with another vendor. At the same time, these customers wanted to know how Linux fits into their current infrastructure (i.e. technology integration & skills reuse). Having an answer which included AIX and other parts of IBM’s offerings helped. Far from being a hindrance (i.e. related products that needed to be protected at all costs), these related products gave IBM the ability to speak to customer needs for the given project and other projects with different needs.

The same thing is happening in the application server space. When JBoss started popping up on customer’s radars, the traditional app server vendors didn’t pay attention (maybe to the degree they should have – depending on who you ask). But, customers satisfied their needs none the less and JBoss downloads and revenue grew.

Lucky for IBM, JBoss started out by targeting customers from other application server vendors. That’s when we made the move to purchase Gluecode Software Co. (a key member of the Geronimo community) and throw our support behind the Apache Geronimo open source application server. We delivered a paid support offering for Geronimo. We also came out with WAS Community Edition (WAS CE), a free product built on Geronimo that developers, customers, and partners could use without support or with paid support.

At the end of the day, customers want choice. And while the WebSphere Application Server (WAS) portfolio is broad, it didn’t give customers a free, light-weight and open source offering, some of the things that were attracting attention to JBoss. We filled that portfolio gap and our revenue continues to surpass market rates. Ensuring a strong tie between these offerings and the rest of the WebSphere portfolio has been a tremendous selling point because customers have different needs for different projects and want to take advantage of the skills they have.

Do we see JBoss in more deals? Yep. Do we lose some? Sure, that’s the software business for you. Do we win a lot more than we would have if we didn’t have the Geronimo Support or WAS CE? Absolutely.

Do you have a point that summarizes this long post? Yeah, thanks for asking: Don’t view open source competition as something to ignore. Get into the ‘game’, give customers the choice they seek and explore how your higher-value offerings (the ones you think you need to protect) can be an asset to your business.

Should we have made the move to support Geronimo earlier? Yeah. But our WAS revenue was growing so fast and our sales teams weren’t running into open source competition, so maybe we became a little complacent. It happens. I have one possible explanation for why, but that’s for another post. BTW, please read my disclaimer here.

[The pic is from Flickr user jawcey]

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I am taking a semi-break from IBM life as I return to finish a PhD in Industrial Engineering. I’ve held roles in market intelligence, strategy and product management. I’m ex-product manager of IBM WAS Community Edition, and blog about enterprise open source topics.

I started thinking about his first resolution: “Enable ease of integration into enterprise stacks”.

This one is really important, and it’s something we heard from IT managers in customer research into open source options back in early 2005. Saving license fees only to have to spend on integration costs with my ‘legacy’ investments isn’t going to help drive open source adoption.

Today, open source projects need to integrate with related traditional commercial software already installed in the enterprise and with other related (leading) open source projects/products. Such decisions are often made by balancing time/resources with the number of potential customers using the product that is to be integrated with. The decision gets difficult when the open source project/vendor decides to offer a competing product to the one they’re considering integrating with.

I’m going to use the following products to help explain my case. I am not making a judgment of JBoss business practices. They are well within their rights & fiduciary duties to do what is necessary to drive Red Hat/JBoss revenue:

• JBoss Co.: The vendor deciding which 3rd party message queuing products will be integrated with their JBoss App Server product
• WebSphere MQ: The leading traditional message queuing product
• JBoss Messaging: An open source message queuing product from JBoss Co.
• AcitveMQ messaging: An open source message queuing product from a competitor

The “integrate with?” decision around a related, leading, traditional commercial product is often simple for an open source vendor. If the market is already dominated by a traditional software product, (WebSphere MQ), then you’d better make sure your open source product (JBoss App Server) plays nice with said product. JBoss Co. may want to compete against that related, leading, commercial product (WebSphere MQ) in the future as they build out an open source stack. But to begin with, JBoss has to respond to customer demand for WebSphere MQ support in order to drive the adoption of JBoss App Server. Once JBoss AS is a known entity by customers, then JBoss can offer their competing messaging product, JBoss Messaging, as they’ve done

The “integrate with?” decision gets difficult for open source vendors when faced with integrating with a competing open source related product. Should JBoss Co. spend time/resources offering rock solid integration with ActiveMQ when JBoss Co. markets JBoss Messaging, a competitor to ActiveMQ? In this case, neither ActiveMQ nor JBoss Messaging have the customer base that the leading traditional commercial product (i.e. WebSphere MQ) does. So why would JBoss Co. want to help drive adoption of ActiveMQ? This scenario has played out several times already at JBoss, and other open source vendors are going to be faced with a similar situation.

It will be interesting to see how these “integrate with?” decisions play out in 2007. What’s good for the customer may not always win out in these decisions.(but one could argue that happens to the same degree with traditional commercial products). An open community with a plurality of vendors with competing & joint goals is one way of addressing this situation with the scales weighted towards “what’s good for the customer”.

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I am taking a semi-break from IBM life as I return to finish a PhD in Industrial Engineering. I’ve held roles in market intelligence, strategy and product management. I’m ex-product manager of IBM WAS Community Edition, and blog about enterprise open source topics.

“(while Red Hat) really haven’t gotten in the way”"the R&D really hasn’t benefited from a huge investment, which I was hoping for and was the main reason I went to Red Hat“

[UPDATED 2006-11-27: Eweek has a longer article on the Fleury interview here]

Well, if Marc was looking for an R&D bump, he should have calculated how much more Red Hat spends on SG&A (sales, marketing & administrative) vs. R&D compared to Oracle or other large IT vendors.

If Marc had done this, he’d have thought twice about Oracle.

But maybe he’ll get to experience that also

While JBoss and Red Hat feel each other out and Marc goes to the Red Hat executive team with his tin cup for R&D, the WAS CE team has been making significant strides against JBoss.

According to an Evans Developer Study of Eclipse users released in the summer, WAS CE usage with Eclipse grew from 0% in 2005 to 16%, compared to a growth of 13% to 19% for JBoss.

That’s nearly 3x faster growth for WAS CE than for JBoss.

Oh, and Apache Geronimo usage by Eclipse users grew from 1% use in 2005 to 14%, not bad eh?

Combined, 30% of developers using Eclipse said they developed against Geronimo/WAS CE compared to 19% for JBoss.

Goes to show you what a true open community (Geronimo) and IBM’s R&D efforts (WAS CE) can team up to do together.

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I am taking a semi-break from IBM life as I return to finish a PhD in Industrial Engineering. I’ve held roles in market intelligence, strategy and product management. I’m ex-product manager of IBM WAS Community Edition, and blog about enterprise open source topics.

The general release of JBoss Portal 2.4 became available with those significant additions. WSRP benefited from the development of several new features:

•  Ability to easily consume portlets from remote producers

•  Seamless integration of WSRP portlets in portal

•  Support for simple registration schemes

•  Simple caching of markup and metadata

•  Support for WSRP Base level (support for service description and markup interfaces)

•  Local portlets can easily be exposed remotely to WSRP consumers

•  Includes a local WSRP producer to easily test WSRP in Portal (‘self’ portlet provider)

JBoss Portal is a standards-based development platform. Through the use of modular applications, called portlets, web developers can deploy JSR-168-compliant features with web framework or collaboration functions on their portals.

For scalability, the JBoss team added render-view caching for improved performance, a clustered portal state, and fully clustered CMS. Administrators on the JBoss Portal can manage users and roles so those who require access can have it at the level they require.

Users of previous versions of JBoss will find a migration application in place starting with version 2.4. That provides an automated walk-through for those upgrading from 2.2.x to 2.4.x, according to the JBoss release notes.

Developers can also view the JBoss Portal 2.4 TestSuite to view results of the nightly test of the codebase.

TestSuite shows the build results, and metrics on broken versus successful builds, and uses CruiseControl for this usage.

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Love-arrangers eHarmony have a more than passing engagement with open source software. But it’s an open marriage, as eHarmony is not looking for open source solutions to its needs, but the best solutions.

A report on NewsForge cited eHarmony VP of engineering and operations on the topic of software choices.

Netcraft shows the domain resides behind a F5 Big-IP load balancer now, instead of reporting Linux as the server’s operating system. F5 would be an example of a “best solution” for hardware, due to its reputation for solid load balancing performance.

Linux of course represents one of several open source options eHarmony has made for its servers. Applications developed for eHarmony run on names that are very familiar to web developers, like Tomcat for handling Java Servlets and JavaServer Pages; JBoss for serving applications; and Apache as its web server of choice.

“It’s most of the stuff everyone is using,” Douglas said in the article. “Open source is not new to our company. We use it extensively, because the best product is often open source. We’re not zealots about open source, we just go out and look for what’s best.”

On the database side, eHarmony chose Oracle over robust open source options like PostgreSQL and Ingres, both of which offer serious relational database choices.

For developers who would like to get open source in the front door of their companies, where proprietary solutions may dominate the work landscape, Douglas offers some advice in the report.

“Just pick the right product. Usually the concern about open source that I’ve witnessed is, ‘how am I gonna get support?’ But even if you’re not paying for support there’s a ton of information out there. I would just find the best product for whatever I’m trying to do, and if that’s open source, there’s generally a company that will help you.”

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Introducing the notion of “declarative application state management” for POJO components, the framework is designed to help solve “a whole class of bugs and performance problems that plague web applications.”

JBoss says it’s Seam framework makes it easier to test Java EE 5 applications by leveraging the JBoss Embeddable EJB3 container and is compatible with any application server that supports the EJB 3.0 public draft or any JSF 1.1 implementation.

“Seam also helps you integrate jBPM process definitions right into your application,” said Thomas Heute, JBoss Seam project leader who will be presenting at Seam at the JBoss World Barcelona event next month.

Seam is applicable to all multi-user applications, with or without an application server, and requires JDK 5.0.

The company is planning a production-ready release “relatively soon,” which may include support of the XML-based definition of conversation pageflow.

This eWeek.com article suggests that developers are already “abuzz” about the framework.

JBoss and the Eclipse Foundation today announced that JBoss has become a member of the Eclipse Foundation and will contribute code toward the J2EE Standard Tools Project. By working together, the two will combine their expertise to provide a more complete and tightly integrated open source tools and middleware solution.

Eclipse is an award-winning universal platform for application development tools integration, software modeling and testing that has been broadly adopted by commercial vendors, academic institutions and open technology developers.

JBoss provides the industry’s most widely used open source J2EE application server and a range of related open source middleware technologies and products. Additionally, it offers the JBoss-IDE, an open source integrated development environment that is used with Eclipse. Many developers use the JBoss-IDE and Eclipse to debug, monitor and control JBoss servers; use XDoclet; and aid in J2EE development of EJBs, servlets and Web services.

“Our objective in joining the Eclipse Foundation, one of the most respected and active open source organizations, is to contribute code that we believe will make it easier for developers to work with JBoss,” said Bob Bickel, vice president of strategy and corporate development, JBoss, Inc. “We anticipate our first major contribution will be a plug-in that will provide developers with a Java-based, aspect oriented framework that will be of use in any programming environment.”

Mike Milinkovich, executive director of the Eclipse Foundation, said, “By working with Eclipse to provide better development tools, JBoss will ultimately help developers build better, easier to use middleware. Eclipse is already in widespread use among companies working with the JBoss Application Server. Now, by formalizing our relationship, the Eclipse Foundation and JBoss will be able to provide developers with an even more complete solution.”

Ashish Larivee, director of product marketing for exteNd and Nsure at Novell, a JBoss Authorized Service Partner and Eclipse Foundation member, commented, “Novell is committed to Eclipse as the common development environment across Novell products, and we believe that JBoss has a unique opportunity to provide leadership to the Eclipse community. We look forward to working together to drive the adoption of J2EE applications on Linux and open source.”

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JBoss today announced general availability of JBoss Application Server 4.0 for enterprise production deployment. JBoss AS 4.0, the company’s flagship open source middleware offering, is the first open source application server to achieve compatibility certification for the Java 2 Platform, Enterprise Edition (J2EE) version 1.4 by passing the 23,000 tests of the Test Compatibility Kit. This next generation of the industry’s most popular open source application server is also the first to implement aspect orientation (AO) for Java, bringing unprecedented productivity, performance and management capability to customers. JBoss AS 4.0 is immediately available under the business-friendly LGPL (Lesser General Public License) open source license.

“Open source is rapidly moving beyond Linux and the operating system into middleware. As a company at the forefront of this second generation of open source, JBoss is focused on building an entire open source middleware stack with JBoss AS as the foundation,” said Marc Fleury, chairman and CEO of JBoss, Inc. “JBoss AS 4.0, the culmination of nearly three years of research in aspect orientation, showcases JBoss’ ability to innovate ahead of the market and deliver a uniquely architected product that significantly enhances flexibility and combines the simplicity of standard Java with the power of the J2EE platform.”

JBoss AS has been downloaded more than five million times and ranks first with Java developers and independent software vendors (ISVs). For the second straight year of their annual award for innovation, the editors of SD Times recognized JBoss AS as the top deployment platform. In a study by BZ Research, use of JBoss AS doubled from 13.9 percent in 2002 to 26.9 percent in 2003, with the highest rate of market-share growth among all app servers. Combining a robust yet flexible architecture with a no-cost open source software license and the full backing of superior technical support services from JBoss technical experts, JBoss AS has quickly become the safe choice among enterprises for their mission-critical applications.

“Our entire business has relied on JBoss AS for the past year and we have been extremely satisfied with the performance and reliability. The modularity of the architecture enabled us to pick and choose the services we needed and tighten integration with the applications running on top. JBoss AS has allowed us to scale both technically and economically,” said Jamie Cash, Director of Technical Architecture, NLG, one of the nation’s largest online and offline leisure travel companies. “Best of all, support for JBoss AS is delivered by JBoss product experts. We were early adopters, so it was critical that whenever we called we could immediately talk to someone who could help us. We have become great advocates of open source projects like JBoss AS that have evolved into best-of-class products.”

Features & Benefits

JBoss AS 4.0 enables middleware providers to deliver greatly simplified programming models to developers without sacrificing service capabilities, including object persistence, caching, acidity, remoteness, transactions and security. Key features and benefits include:

— Scalability. JBoss offers full clustering of any Java object, including EJB, JMS, HTTP and Plain Old Java Objects (POJOs).

— Performance. Based on their own internal benchmark tests, JBoss users have found that JBoss offers improved performance and superior server utilization over other leading J2EE application servers.

— Customizable footprint. A modular and elegant architecture built on a microkernel-based design leverages JMX extensions. The result is a lightweight component model that allows users to tailor the footprint to meet their specific needs.

— Services-oriented architecture. Services can be easily added or removed based on the specific needs of the user. All services are neatly packaged and fully hot-deployable. Users can also create and add their own services easily.

— Enterprise-class services for any Java object. Aspect-oriented framework allows users to deliver EJB-like functionality such as persistence and distributed transactional caching to any POJO.

— Application-level features, including no compilation, full security implementation and JAAS integration.

— Full standards support. JBoss AS 4.0 offers full support for J2EE 1.4.

— Valuable sum of parts. JBoss AS 4.0 comes integrated with other leading JBoss-federated open source products, all backed with support from JBoss, Inc.:

— Tomcat 5, the leading open source Web container. The integrated version offers additional value to the standalone product such as high performance, transactional HttpSession clustering over JBossCache.

— JBossCache, the first open source transactional, distributed cache for fine-grained Java objects.

— Hibernate 2.1, the popular ORM engine, which enables POJO persistence and a smooth transition to EJB3.

— Tools. JBossIDE provides additional convenience to developers, such as server lifecycle control, debugging, EJB packaging, deployment and AOP support.

Support & Services

JBoss, Inc. provides a full range of expert support services delivered by the experts behind the JBoss Application Server, including 24×7 Support, on-site and remote RightStart Support, public and on-site training and documentation. Support and services are also available through the company’s extensive network of JBoss Authorized Service Partners (JASP), which includes leading ISVs like Computer Associates, HP, Novell and Unisys.

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