Red Hat to build enterprise stack on JBoss ESB .40

The acquired JBoss Enterprise Service Bus will underpin Red Hat's push to rival the likes of IBM and Oracle

Red Hat has laid out more plans on how it will use its JBoss acquisition as a jemmy to compete with enterprise stack providers such as IBM, Oracle and Microsoft.

Helping the effort will be a new JBoss Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) that acts as the transport linking applications, components and services on the JBoss Enterprise Middleware Suite (Jems) and Red Hat Linux. ESBs are becoming established as the integration cornerstone on which companies develop service-oriented architectures (SOAs) where systems are broken down into components that can talk to each other across platforms. The JBoss ESB is based on the Rosetta ESB code contributed by insurance company Aviva Canada, with added support for JBoss's message queuing, business rules engine and other components.

Due for general availability in December, JBoss ESB 4.0 will be supplemented by planned business performance management, workflow and other tools to replicate the functionality of closed-source middleware providers. Partners will also bulk out the Red Hat offering with plug-in programs that extend functionality. SeeWhy Software said it will provide a business intelligence product that takes advantage of the ESB and other new and updated Jems features, for example.

At the JBoss World event in Berlin, Red Hat also previewed JBoss Application Server 5.0 that supports Java Enterprise Edition 5.0.

Red Hat’s ambition is to deliver a stack that offers a cheaper, more flexible option than those provided by IT giants.

Paul Cormier, Red Hat executive vice-president of engineering, said the stack could obviate the “dependency on pricey, monolithic platforms that guarantee lock-in and products that must be cobbled together”.

Industry watchers said the moves were a logical extension of Red Hat’s strategy.
“RedHat/JBoss has been moving up the stack from the core app server to provide more of the capabilities required to support an SOA initiative, for example, with business process management capabilities,” said Neil Macehiter of analyst firm Macehiter Ward-Dutton.

“Message broking, mediation, transformation - the capabilities provided by an ESB - are a necessary element of that stack so this does not come as a great surprise. I think that the JBoss stack will appeal to organisations undertaking proof-of-concept, evaluation and development SOA initiatives from which JBoss will then attempt to build out into production. Success will depend on providing organisations with best-practice advice and services to assist with those initiatives together with effective partnerships with providers of other key enabling technologies such as management, security and identity. The company’s relationship with HP should assist in this regard.”

However, even closed-source software giants are leaning on open-source tools. For example, IBM cited Evans Data research to suggest that its WebSphere Application Server Community Edition based on Apache Geronimo, is growing quickly, with 250,000 copies downloaded in six months.