<<With the $350-million acquisition of application server provider JBoss by open-source platform vendor Red Hat, we'll see the rise of the first OSS-SOA powerhouse in the market. Will this usher in a new era of software commoditization?
A few weeks back, I had the opportunity to speak with Winston Damarillo, founder of Gluecode, which is now IBM's open-source WebSphere Application Server, Community Edition - and his words especially ring true in light of the Red Hat-JBoss acquisition. (Some of our chat posted here .) Damarillo had observed that the SOA/OSS combination "is fast providing an environment where free software foundations can deliver faster code than closed source, and redefine the entire business." He then added that "there are opportunities for commercial vendors - as Dell did with hardware - that create an assembly of components into a stack, manage the versions, and deliver it to the customer." This may be the route the Red Hat-JBoss combo is traveling. For the most part, industry observers are keen on the announced acquisition of JBoss by Red Hat software. Michael Azoff, senior research analyst with Butler Group , observed that the acquisition is creating the first "open-source super-company." Michael Goulde, senior analyst with Forrester Research is quoted in SearchWebServices as saying that the acquisition "may help accelerate Red Hat's shift to SOA," but cautions that "there isn't anything inherent in the acquisition that will accelerate customer's shift. JBoss' ability to accelerate adoption of SOA will depend on how well it executes on its SOA strategy. This will entail JBoss delivering a complete, high-quality, manageable, secure platform for SOA development, along with the services customers require that are often hard to obtain for open source." JBoss's strategy has been to make an SOA-based stack available to enterprises or business units within enterprises that may not have the resources or organizational support to move service-oriented architecture forward. JBoss plays to the incremental - versus a mega-project "big-bang" approach - to SOA, Marc Fluery, CEO of JBoss, said in an interview a couple of months back. He said JBoss has been following a roadmap that "delivers a modular approach to SOA. It maps very well to the reality of the field where people are taking baby steps." While the larger commercial infrastructure providers want to roll out full-fledged, one-size-fits-all approaches, "what we hear from the market right now is we don't want to eat that elephant right now. Give us a modular approach so we can do step-by-step and proof of concepts and integrate some departments and have a rev up to SOA, as opposed to this big supernova you're supposed to swallow at once. I'd say we're very well positioned on the SOA front as a technology enabler and I feel very strongly about that position." Perhaps the greatest impact of the acquisition is that it is evidence of the growing alignment between the SOA and open-source software communities. The announcement affirms the growing fact that many of the services in an SOA - and supporting infrastructure - will be built and maintained on open-source components. Many SOAs will be, or are already running on, the LAMP (Linux-Apache-MySQL-PHP/Perl/Python) stack. There are many other layers that can now be added to the stack, all the way from open-source ESBs such as Celtix and Mule to full-fledged open-source applications such as SugarCRM and OpenOffice. >> You can read the whole blog at: http://www.webservices.org/weblog/joe_mckendrick/oss_and_soa_meet_the_new_power_couple Gervas Yahoo! Groups Links <*> To visit your group on the web, go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/service-orientated-architecture/ <*> To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] <*> Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to: http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
