04/24/2007

Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE: RHT), a provider of open source solutions, today rolled out its middleware strategy to drive the next migration to an Open Source Architecture with the announcement of an agreement to acquire MetaMatrix and the introduction of new JBoss offerings.

Read ebizQ's special Open Source blogging coverage from Dennis Byron here.

ebizQ received the following:

Last month's delivery of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 continues the Unix-to-Linux migration that has returned millions of dollars in value to customers over the last five years. Now, Red Hat is presenting the next high value migration opportunity, which Red Hat believes will deliver even greater cost savings to enterprises: moving siloed legacy applications to JBoss Enterprise Middleware.

“With many enterprises spending as much as 70% of their IT budget on maintaining stove-piped legacy applications while a backlog of projects continues piling up, it's clear that proprietary application infrastructure vendors have failed to deliver relief for the CIO,” said Tim Yeaton, Senior Vice President of Enterprise Solutions, Red Hat. “Until now, enterprises have had to choose from solutions with high acquisition, high integration, and high lock-in costs. By applying the attributes that made Red Hat Enterprise Linux the number one Unix migration platform to our JBoss Enterprise Middleware, Red Hat is providing customers a migration path to long-term value, choice, and control of their IT infrastructure.”

Siloed legacy applications hardwired to data sources have created inflexible application infrastructures that prohibit shared corporate IT assets, data reuse, interoperability, and business agility. JBoss Enterprise Middleware offers an open, low-cost, high-value migration foundation for customers to modernize these legacy application infrastructures to service-oriented architectures (SOA). Today's new developer and enterprise support subscriptions dramatically simplify the use of JBoss Enterprise Middleware for SOA across the application life cycle. When complete, the MetaMatrix acquisition will add a federated data services SOA layer for JBoss Enterprise Middleware that enables data to be exposed as services for integration, workflow, and business process modeling.

MetaMatrix Unlocks Data for SOA Red Hat has signed a definitive agreement to acquire the business of MetaMatrix, a leader in data management and integration software. This market is estimated to reach $1.3B in 2007 according to Forrester Research. The consummation of the transaction is subject to the satisfaction of certain conditions to closing set forth in the acquisition agreement. Once the transaction is completed, MetaMatrix will be integrated into Red Hat’s JBoss division.

While SOA offers a cost-effective opportunity to modernize legacy infrastructures and provide true interoperability across applications and software components, it alone does not resolve data access challenges and the physical and semantic differences among disparate, physical data sources. MetaMatrix eliminates these challenges with a data services layer that decouples applications from their data sources and makes valuable data assets available as services in an SOA, freeing data from single application silos. It does this while simultaneously providing mechanisms for data consistency, security and compliance.

Ray Lane, General Partner with Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and MetaMatrix Board Member, applauded the acquisition and its implications for the future of data management: “IT infrastructure is continuously evolving and enterprises are always looking for low-risk, low-TCO solutions that will help them keep up with the changes while ensuring that the data – their most valuable asset – remains relevant, accessible, and reusable in any situation. We see federated data services as key to this, which is why we invested in MetaMatrix. Red Hat has a clear vision for providing an end-to-end, open source infrastructure that addresses these needs, and we are pleased that these two visionary companies will now work as one to deliver valuable solutions for customers' data management needs.”

JBoss Enterprise Platform Subscriptions To accelerate this next migration and make it easier for customers to build on and deploy JBoss Enterprise Middleware, Red Hat is moving away from the current a la carte approach where customers mix and match different components to suit their IT projects to a set of integrated, tested, and certified JBoss Enterprise Platform distributions for the most common use cases. These new distributions come as a single download and are supported by a fully inclusive subscription with automated update and patch stream and multi-year service level agreements (SLAs).

When CitiStreet, a global benefits provider supporting over 12 million participants, needed to upgrade its benefits record-keeping portal to accommodate ongoing growth, it migrated to JBoss for its scalability, cost efficiency, and open access to the code base. CIO Barry Strasnick commented: "The ability to avoid vendor lock-in, accessibility to the code, and developer support were key factors we were looking for. Overall, the JBoss solution is superior, costs less, and they do a better job of supporting us than our previous vendors. As a result, we continue in our evolution to move all production boxes to an open source environment. We are comfortable moving our mission-critical applications to JBoss and Red Hat."

Fully inclusive subscription support is available now for the JBoss Enterprise Application Platform. The Application Platform helps customers easily deploy and host applications and web services. It integrates several products into a single distribution: JBoss Application Server for business logic and clustering; Hibernate for object/relational mapping and persistence; and JBoss Seam for building next-generation Web 2.0 applications. Future JBoss Enterprise Platform offerings will be available for portal applications, SOA integration, and business process automation requirements.

JBoss.org Enhancements With the creation of JBoss Enterprise Platform distributions, Red Hat is freeing up the JBoss.org community from the constraints of the productization process so it can focus on what it does best: innovate. The newly redesigned and rebranded JBoss.org site debuted today with new tools and developer-focused content to enhance the participant experience. JBoss.org remains the the R&D hotbed for JBoss Enterprise Platforms, but from today onwards, its 30-plus projects will have more latitude to deliver bleeding edge technologies faster to users. Once these releases are enterprise-ready, they will be integrated into JBoss Enterprise Platform distributions. Project releases remain freely available for download under an LGPL, GPL, or Apache open source license. Ad-hoc support for JBoss.org releases will be provided through the community.

Red Hat Developer Subscriptions Building on the partnership with Exadel that was announced in March 2007, Red Hat also introduced today new Red Hat Developer Support Subscriptions. Designed to help both corporate developers and independent software vendors (ISVs) jump-start their SOA, Java, and Linux development projects, Red Hat Developer Support Subscriptions offer guaranteed service levels that support developers from development to production. Red Hat Developer Support Subscriptions are available with two different SLA options, offer unlimited support inquiries, and cover all JBoss Enterprise and Red Hat Enterprise Linux offerings. Later in 2007, Red Hat will release Red Hat Developer Studio, an open source development environment that integrates Eclipse-based tooling with JBoss and Red Hat Enterprise solutions.