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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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