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For all the claims of some OSS enthusiasts, OSS came to the SOA game a couple of years later than the closed source vendors. Coming in later has its benefits of course: the needs are clearer and the late comers benefit from the experiences of the early innovators. This 'second mover advantage' is particularly strong with SOA as the market has developed quite slowly. This slow growth stopped the early innovators on the closed source side from getting any sort of market dominance.

Most of the OSS SOA solutions have up until recently focused on the base infrastructure required for first generation SOA projects (I say most as Bosteq for one took a different tack by focusing on the major 'higher level' problem: developer productivity). What has been lacking or weak with the OSS offerings has been the enterprise level capabilities such as management and application connectivity which are essential for any widescale deployment of enterprise infrastructure software.

Alex Fletcher's blog on RedHat's ambitions for its SOA strategy highlights two recent partnership announcements which shows RedHat is the latest OSS SOA vendor to start to address these gaps: Partnering with iWay on enterprise application connectors and with Hyperic for management.

iWay has become the standard port of call for most if not all SOA vendors needing an enterprise application connector story - I say story because while end-users like to know that such connectors are available, they do not necessarily end-up buying them. For RedHat, it presents some interesting issues: iWay is not an OSS vendor - and hence the customer is forced into a hybrid model of OSS and closed source. While this may not be a problem (IONA follows a similar model within its own family of closed and open source products), it seems to be a major disparture for a company such as RedHat so closely aligned with OSS.

The Hyperic relationship is also a little me-too as it follows the path already followed by MuleSource. In this case there are no 'religious differences' as Hyperic is also OSS. And me-too has some obvious advantages for the users: It is better if vendors converge onto one solution as any widescale SOA deployment is bound to include multiple SOA platforms which need to be managed as a whole.

Which makes both announcements positive steps for RedHat. However, they still have a long way to go before they are ready to win the 50% of the market which Alex points out is their strategic goal. And in my opinion they must greatly accelerate their moves to make their platform enterprise grade if they are to have any chance to achieve that goal by 2012 as is their stated aim.

Ronan

Posted by rbradley in Market Trends • Product news • SOA Predictions |Digg This|Add to del.icio.us

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