On Feb 13, Red Hat announced it wanted to "own" 50% of middleware deployments by 2015.
On February 14, Red Hat put some meat on that lofty goal by formally announcing the previously pre-announced JBoss SOA platform and three new open source software (OSS) community projects. Two of the new projects are tied to Red Hat's acquisition of Metamatrix and the company's long time relationship with Hyperic respectively.
The third project, code-named "Black tie" because it is a direct shot at BEA's Tuxedo base, is based on the Arjuna technology which Red Hat acquired in late 2005. (Arjuna had been spun out of HP when it exited the middleware market in 2002, dropping the Bluestone middleware line of which Arjuna had been a part.) That idea makes a lot sense given that many Tuxedo users--who have already been moved from AT&T to Novell to BEA over the years--are now going to be moved to Oracle.
These are the Red Hat middleware products/projects--along with their future versions--that it is going to take to displace long-term installed middleware products such as Tuxedo as well as IBM WebSphere, MQ Series and CICS, BEA/Oracle's WebLogic and Plumtree, Oracle's many heritage and acquired (non-BEA) middleware products, TIBCO Rendezvous and subsequent products as well as its BPM line up, Iona CORBA-based heritage middleware, SoftwareAG/WebMethods products, Adobe/Macromedia, Sun/SeeBeyond, and so forth.
Of course the Sun/SeeBeyond example highlights the nature of Red Hat's challenge: all of these companies are adopting open source terms and conditions--and development models--rapidly, thereby eliminating one of the major reasons a user might want to consider kicking out the long litany of past and present middleware legends in favor of JBoss.
One advantage Red Hat has over many of the more established middleware players is that it has practically built its SOA platform from scratch (with the Arjuna exception noted above). Many of the others have a 40-year technology amalgamation that shares very little in common other than a brand name. Without mentioning their name, Red Hat's Pierre Fricke rightly criticized Oracle for having both an SOA platform and an event-driven architecture platform. "Why are two needed?" he implied. He could have added: And a BPM platform? And a collaboration platform? And a you-name-it platform? Oracle has all that stuff because of its many acquisitions.
The JBoss Enterprise SOA Platform also supports mix and match a little better than the established players although I do not expect that advantage to last very long. Red Hat announced that active JBoss SOA middleware partners with which its users could mix and match include Active Endpoints, Amberpoint, Information Builders and iWay Software, SeeWhy, SOA Software and Vitria Technology. In particular, Red Hat talked about an interesting BPM partnership with Vitria. This may breathe some new life into one of the original integration middleware providers.
The Metamatrix technology mentioned above will drive a project called DNA related to SOA governance. Red Hat and Hyperic have released into the OSS community a jointly developed management platform project, named RHQ.
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