IONA Upgrades FUSE Family of SOA Products

| Sep 27, 2007 | Application Infrastructure | Competitive Intelligence Report
| Analyst: Brad Shimmin

Current Perspective: Positive
Vendor Importance: Very High
Market Impact: Moderate

Event Summary

On September 24th IONA Technologies released a new version of its FUSE family of open source SOA products. FUSE is IONA's tested, certified, and warranted open source product family based on popular projects hosted by the Apache Software Foundation. IONA provides professional support, consulting, and training for enterprise customers looking to deploy open source SOA technology in mission-critical business applications.

Analytical Summary

• Current Perspective: Positive on IONA’s series of updates to its fledgling open source, service-oriented architecture (SOA) product family, FUSE, because this release combines a number of product-specific updates targeting high-end messaging environments, lightweight enterprise service bus (ESB) integration patterns, and improved inter-product rationalization and integration. While the end result will not alter the SOA competitive landscape immediately, IONA’s continued commitment to its open source product line positions the vendor between traditional closed source and fully open source vendors with complementary SOA solutions for customers interested in either approach.

• Vendor Importance: Very high to IONA, which needed to elucidate and show progress on a comprehensive and cohesive open source game plan, following on the heals of its disruptive acquisition of LogicBlaze this spring, after which the company discarded its Celtix product family in favor of a more unified FUSE portfolio. With this release, the company has logically built upon both brand and technology acquired from LogicBlaze this April. More importantly, IONA has established a distinct business unit dedicated to FUSE and open source. It has also cross-trained its Artix and FUSE sales teams and hired new support and engineering staff to carry its open source efforts.

• Market Impact: Moderate on the service-oriented architecture (SOA) market, as IONA’s collection of updates will not change the competitive landscape immediately. Longer term, however, with its strong ties to the Apache Software Foundation and internal engineering efforts to meld its various FUSE elements together into a cohesive SOA platform, IONA will provide a compelling alternative to unsupported Apache installations and rival pure open source vendors, including Red Hat, MuleSource, and WSO2. Its ability to combine the FUSE and Artix product lines will eventually determine the company’s ability to compete with major rivals such as BEA, IBM, Sun, and others within the broader SOA market.

Recommended Competitor Actions

• All rival vendors should position IONA’s set of FUSE product upgrades as simply customary and not including any market-moving technological advances. These vendors should note, however, that in the near future, the company’s use of the Apache Camel project (released as FUSE Mediation Router) will likely yield a competitive advantage in terms of IONA being able to provide ESB customers with pre-built integration patterns matching specific vertical use cases.

• Red Hat should position IONA’s FUSE product family as being foundational but not comprehensive, as comparatively, IONA does not field portal, tooling, or BPM solutions with its open source offerings. That said, Red Hat should consider working with IONA to augment front-line support for the Apache CFX project, which Red Hat utilizes.

• Rivals with open source solutions position IONA’s FUSE solution set as being primarily a collection of Apache projects tied together with a centralized installation and configuration tool. They should also call attention to the fact that IONA has chosen not to field its own development environment and that it has yet to create a centralized management console with advanced features such as patch management, software provisioning, and user access control capabilities.

• Rival SOA platform vendors without closed source, server-side offerings should consider IONA’s continued investment in FUSE as a long-term threat. The company will undoubtedly begin to utilize FUSE as a complement to the company’s closed source SOA family of products, Artix, which the vendor has broadened this year with the addition of a registry/repository and data management tools. Rivals should note that IONA does not intend to utilize FUSE as a means to up-sell customers into Artix technologies. This approach has yet to be proven, however, as IONA is just beginning to sell both product lines jointly.

• MuleSource, BEA, Cape Clear, Progress Software, and Microsoft should point out that their ESB solutions have already made headway into the growing SaaS market area with either hosted solutions or technologies designed to facilitate the creation of SaaS offerings with integration capabilities. Vendors with closed source solutions in this area should beware of their open source counterparts, which, owing to more lenient licensing models, will gain a more competitive stance in partnering with ISVs.

Recommended End User / Customer Actions

• Existing FUSE customers with high-end messaging needs should welcome this set of upgrades. The company’s FUSE Message Broker v5.0 is now based on the Apache ActiveMQ v5.0 project, which includes a number of enhancements targeting performance.

• Potential customers that are interested in building an Apache-centric SOA deployment should strongly consider IONA’s FUSE product family. IONA has, with this release, removed a number of redundant systems and created useful points of integration between its various Apache-based products.

• Existing and potential customers looking for a solution that facilitates the creation of simple integration patterns should strongly consider the FUSE Services Framework and FUSE Mediation Router products, as these, when combined, can form a lightweight ESB.

• Potential customers interested in open source solutions, but wary of potential exposure to copyright infringement litigation, should consider two factors that mitigate IONA’s lack of indemnification. First, the company’s software warranty (which is the same for both Artix and FUSE) offers relatively the same protection as indemnification programs by companies such as Red Hat and Novell. Second, FUSE is based on technologies created within one of the industry’s largest open source communities and, as such, it is subject to a high degree of scrutiny.

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Current Perspective

Competitive Positives

Competitive Concerns

Recommended Vendor Actions

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