Red Hat Refocuses Middleware Efforts and Expands into Data Management

| April 26, 2007 | Application Infrastructure | Competitive Intelligence Report

| Analyst: Brad Shimmin

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

Event Summary

On April 24th Red Hat 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. 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 has presented 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.

Analytical Summary

• Current Perspective: Positive on Red Hat’s varied announcements concerning the acquisition of data management vendor MetaMatrix, reinvestment in the JBoss.org community and restructuring of core JBoss middleware offerings. Taken together, these moves further solidify Red Hat has a leader in the open source SOA market and signal the company’s arrival as a bona fide competitor on the broader SOA stage.

• Vendor Importance: Very high to Red Hat’s bifurcation of its JBoss.org community software and its subscription-based offerings, which it has rebranded as JBoss Enterprise Platform Subscriptions. JBoss.org community members can access innovations with an aggressive release cycle, while Red Hat platform subscribers will receive vendor-supplied software enhancements at a more measured pace in the form of a single download containing a collection of products that have been tested for interoperability and stability.

• Market Impact: High on the overall SOA market, as Red Hat’s move into data management and recommitment to enterprise-class middleware, coupled with the company’s aggressive pricing model, will prove disruptive for traditional SOA vendors employing open source as a means to reach the mid-market. As the company adds missing middleware elements to its platform subscriptions, it may eventually come into parity with vendors like IBM, BEA, TIBCO and Sun with open source-savvy customers demanding both innovation and a stable production offering.

Recommended Competitor Actions

• IONA as the owner of an open source ESB and now all software assets of Red Hat competitor, LogicBlaze, should strengthen its open source SOA products positioning statements to emphasis its focus on infrastructure, rather than applications, to compete with Red Hat, which has chosen a broader infrastructure-oriented path. IONA should also reconsider its decision not to open source its recently released registry/repository, as this likely will become a point of differentiation between IONA and Red Hat.

• WSO2 should move its ESB from beta to production as quickly as possible to keep pace with Red Hat’s continued work with its Rosetta-based ESB. WS02 should promote the fact that its ESB will include a built-in registry, which tracks with a current trend toward positioning process governance as a foundational element of SOA installations of any size.

• Closed-source SOA software vendors should monitor Red Hat’s approach to tightly integrated and well-tested, use case-based SOA stacks. As evidenced by recent moves at IBM with its portal product, this approach shows strong potential, especially if vendors are able to also combine vertical industry knowledge in the form of common processes, data models and best practices.

• Closed-source SOA software vendors employing open source solutions (IBM, IONA, TIBCO, BEA and Sun) should perceive Red Hat’s overall SOA vision as both disruptive and potentially threatening, particularly with regards to the company’s refocused efforts on community-driven software that can rapidly evolve and then feed stable, enterprise-ready solution stacks.
• All SOA rivals and potential rivals should see Red Hat’s acquisition of MetaMatrix as a clear shot over the bow in the battle to bring data accountability and governance to the SOA market, which has to date focused on governing processes and the data within those processes without truly addressing data sources. Progress Software, IBM and Oracle should of course see this as further validation of their continued work in data management.

Recommended End User / Customer Actions

• Existing Red Hat customers should investigate the company’s emerging JBoss Enterprise Platform Subscriptions. One of the first available solutions, JBoss Enterprise Application Platform for Portals, carries a very attractive price point ($9,000 annually for a standard subscription) and fulfills most customary portal requirements, including interportlet communications, support for WSRP, JSR 168 and JSR 170.

• Existing Red Hat middleware customers with active a la carte support subscriptions should discuss the possibility of transferring those subscriptions to the appropriate JBoss Enterprise Platform Subscriptions package, as these packaged solutions may cost less to support than the customer’s current environment.

• Potential Red Hat customers should welcome the JBoss Enterprise Application Platform as a replacement for the company’s previous JEMS product. This new subscription (like the Platform for Portals) tightly bundles JBoss’ main middleware offerings, including JBoss Application Server, with JBoss Hibernate, and JBoss Seam.

• MetaMatrix customers should press Red Hat to provide, as soon as the acquisition is complete, a clear roadmap that will carry their MetaMatrix EII software from licensed to open source. Initially, the company intends to transition existing software to a support subscription model, the details of which have yet to be communicated. MetaMatrix and Red Hat customers will also need to continue paying invoices for both companies separately, though the company intends to integrate those after the acquisition closes.

Top