There's an interesting post today on Gartner's Unconventional Thinking blog, called "Honing the BPM Message," by Gartner VP David McCoy.

McCoy talks about how IT needs a new reputation:

BPM is appealing to the business side of the house, so much so that its principles are driving the business to knock on IT's door for technological assistance. In some cases, IT is caught off-guard, with no hype and story to promote. Some in IT "get" BPM, but many do not - especially the core of programmers who consider BPM to be a poor man's way to do systems development. Those who do get BPM see in it a new way to justify IT's value to the business. In theory, the business wants to be agile, and at the same time, it wants to be deterministic.

Read more here.

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Keith Harrison-Broninski today comments on findings in IBM's publication, Patterns: [Service-Oriented Architecture and Web Services, part of their authoritative RedBook series (p.5)]:

"When faced with the challenge of designing a solution for a business problem, the first step is to get a high-level view of the goals you are trying to achieve. A proposed business scenario should be described and each element should be matched to an appropriate IBM Pattern for e-business.", where "A Business pattern describes the relationship between the users, the business organizations or applications, and the data to be accessed."

Read more here.

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A new edition of Steve Minsky's monthly column is up, entitled "The Elephant at the Enterprise Risk Management Party."

Check it out here.

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From David Linthicum:

"Who did not see this one coming? I mean, when you drink at the open source bar, you’re bound to get together at some point. This is an opportunity for Red Hat to build JBoss into the operating system, providing optimizations that BEA only dreams about, however IBM has the power to do, but does not. Good move, and I do agree that an open source database is next."

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From Cape Clear's Annrai O'Toole:

"The combination of Red Hat and jBoss makes a lot of sense and it is certainly a combination which has most of the ingredients to be, what the investment bankers like to term, "very synergistic". Further, it is a major change to the whole enterprise software landscape. Let me explain ....

"First lets have a quick look at what both companies do. Red Hat is by far the most popular and successful Open Source Operating System out there. In many ways, Red Hat has pioneered the subscription model for Open Source software. It has proven that there is a very profitable and high growth business model around Open Source Software. However, for all its success, Red Hat is not really all that geeky! Red Hat does not really have a developer community. The people who buy Red Hat are the people in the operations part of the data centers. They buy it because it is the most reliable and dependable operating system to run a business on. The people who buy Red Hat are, by and large, not software developers. So, great and all as Red Hat is, it needed to extend its franchise -- or be squeezed. It needed to be bigger than just a Linux company, it needed to be an Open Source company.

"And that's where jBoss comes in. jBoss has grown out of very techie roots -- the desire to write a modular and flexible J2EE platform that developers would love, rather than the behemoths that are WebSphere and WebLogic. jBoss was right. Developers loved it. Also, jBoss came to the fore just at the right time: As the enterprise software market imploded in 2001 and developers found that they couldn't create a purchase order for a pencil, they suddenly found that there was an Open Source alternative to WebSphere and WebLogic. Not only was it free but it was elegant. Developers flocked to it in their thousands. Afterwards people began to deploy it and jBoss began to build a business around supporting those deployments.

"So now we have the combination of the most popular Open Source Operating System and the most popular and startegically important enterprise Java development platform. This reshapes the enterprise software market. This market, that was becoming dominated by fewer and fewer players has now been blown open. A new kid is on the block and with it a new set of rules: broad distribution, community based participative software which is inclusive rather than proprietary and subscription based pricing where customers can pay when they need to. This most important of all software markets is about to be reformed and changed utterly. We at Cape Clear are cheering out loud."

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View from ebizQ Blogger Keith Harrison-Broninski on the Red Hat-JBoss acquisition:

Good news for everyone - if you want another Microsoft, that is. RedHat Linux is already going the way that the Windows operating system did 20 years ago, as its market dominance gradually makes the survival of similar offerings less and less likely. IBM in particular must have been wondering how they managed to let it happen all over again. Now, in the same way that Microsoft strengthened its operating system monopoly via office applications, RedHat is aiming to do so via middleware.

But who actually is threatened by this? After all, both Linux and the JBoss stack are good software (some of which - jBPM - I've been recommending in my blog). However, don't be misled by the ability to
download source code. There will soon be nothing to stop RedHat inflating "the price of their support", for which, if you are an enterprise user, read "the price of their software". And neither RedHat nor JBoss have been shy of adding their own custom features to supposedly standard platforms in the past, so vendor lock-in is inevitable - just look at what a vast and complex mashup JBoss is becoming these days.

In the short-term, a RedHat/JBoss merger may be just what the developer community wants to see. In the longer term, I'm not so sure it will be for the good of the IT industry.

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From the Patricia Seybold Group's Brenda Michelson:

I think the Red Hat/JBoss deal is good news for the enterprise. It was important for JBoss to land at a known, trusted, enterprise vendor, who is committed to both the open source community and enterprise adopters. I suspect the rationalization of JBoss JEMS projects with Red Hat’s Application Server will be heavy on JEMS components. I’m interested to see the outcome of that rationalization, as well as Red Hat’s next move. Database anyone?

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OnStrategies' Tony Baer wrote an ebizQ article recently about the possibility of Oracle buying JBoss. Here are Tony's comment on today's news:

"This is Red Hat's attempt to graft JBoss onto the LAMP stack. More importantly, this is part of Red Hat's strategy to solidy its position as the de facto open source platform. For JBoss, Red Hat is obviously a more compatible partner than Oracle, which was the rumor a couple months ago. It's obvious that both have business models that are mutually in sync.

"Given the acquistion rumors that have swirled around JBoss for the last several months, it's clear that this was not only another typical example of the exit strategy for successful startup, but that the company required deeper pockets if it was to further its growth.

"It will be interesting to see if the mutual support agreement with Microsoft will survive this acquistion, and in general, how this impacts Microsoft's open source coopotion strategy in general."

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Big news today.

Red Hat Inc., the world's biggest distributor of Linux-based computer software, agreed to buy JBoss Inc. for $420 million to gain more Internet-based programs.

The transaction includes $210 million in stock, $140 million in cash, plus $70 million once certain goals are reached, Raleigh, North Carolina-based Red Hat said in a Business Wire statement today.

Competitor comment below and more analyst views forthcoming.

From OpenLogic:

"Large enterprises that we talk to certainly want 'one throat to choke' for certification and support of open source solutions - and the deal today between JBoss and Red Hat could help provide that for key fixed stacks. Certainly the valuation that JBoss received from Red Hat shows that Red Hat believes there is demand for certification for core pieces of the open source stack," said Steven Grandchamp, CEO of OpenLogic. "But certified fixed stacks are just the tip of the iceberg. Many large enterprises use hundreds of open source projects mixed in with proprietary and commercial software - so the larger need is for companies to have the flexibility to create
stacks that are specific to their needs."

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Yesterday, IBM called a big news conference around their new SOA offerings, featuring IBM Senior Vice President and Software Group Executive Steve Mills. Read the release here.

However, there are differing perspectives emerging on what it was all about. Bruce Silver said that while the explanations of the offerings were still sketchy, one message was clear.

"This was mostly shock and awe: Surrender Earthlings, our technology is simply too vast and powerful…"

OnStrategies.com's Tony Baer, reached on the road at Sandhill Software's 2006 conference, said 'I thought that IBM's announcement was a bit anticlimatic, that it was mostly a case of them saying, "let's make some sense of what we've done lately" as opposed to "here's a dramatic new direction" or "here's SOA's new killer app for the enterprise."'

I'll post more commentary on the announcement as I find it.

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