Last year Red Hat held a JBoss conference in sunny Orlando in February. So how come I'm sitting here in my sweater looking at the snow for the 2009 JBoss meeting? Because Red Hat went virtual on February 11 and it was an impressive effort (which will be available to you online somehow--until May I believe).
Red Hat and its middleware group is one of the companies I talk about now and again that thinks of business process management (BPM) as part of a service oriented architecture (SOA) instead of the other way around. But that's no excuse not to take a look. Marketing director Pierre Fricke, with whom we've spoken here and here, talked about how Red Hat is lining JBoss up directly against IBM and Oracle/BEA (just as other Red Hat products are being lined up against IBM, EMC, etc. in the infrastructure world of virtualization, file storage, and so forth). One of the advantages or disadvantages of success is that you get to play with the big boys.
Pierre explained that the JBoss SOA platform is currently at 4.3 and moving ahead via more point releases in 2009. He says the highlights of the point releases will be more robust business rules management (BRMS) and the ability to separate BRMS and the jBPM process engine from ESB, application server and other foundational JBoss projects/products.
I say project or produt because remember JBoss is an open source project which means much of the functionality is available for download before it is an official Red Hat release. But in the real world, most users do not make an open vs. closed source distinction so I always talk about JBoss when I'm reviewing any BPM products (and I always include OpenBravo when I am reviewing any ERP products, and so forth).
The reason that jBPM and the JBoss rules engine have been so closely linked to the foundation until now is that they are also used for issuing orchestration and choreography directions and as composition tools for services as well as for business processes.
But by next February, at whatever cold place I am sitting, Red Hat sounds like it might be more tuned to my BPM as value proposition/SOA as architecture way of looking at things. Fricke said it might even be called a Business Automation Platform by then, combining jBPM and the BRMS with business alert monitoring and event-driven business intelligence.
In other words, whatever it takes to play with the big boys.
-- Dennis Byron
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