JBoss World:

Red Hat Ramps Up SOA Portfolio and Practices

| Feb 15, 2008 | Application Infrastructure | Show Update

| Analyst: Brad Shimmin

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

Event Summary

February 14, 2008 -- Red Hat announced the global availability of the JBoss Enterprise SOA Platform. The solution provides service-oriented architecture (SOA), application, and business-process integration capabilities in a single, easy-to-consume enterprise distribution. The firm also announced the sponsorship of three new open source community projects expected to expand the JBoss Enterprise Middleware portfolio in the future as part of its Enterprise Acceleration initiative. These new product initiatives include BEA Tuxedo-compatible transaction processing, SOA governance, and enhanced systems management. In addition, Red Hat announced the "Enterprise Acceleration" initiative designed to help its enterprise customers accelerate their transition to a next-generation, open source middleware architecture based on JBoss Enterprise Middleware.

Analytical Summary

• Current Perspective: Positive on Red Hat’s series of announcements made at JBoss World. The company has capitalized upon and responded to a number of timely market opportunities surrounding Oracle’s acquisition of BEA as well as WSO2 and MuleSource’s recently introduced governance solutions. More generally, the firm has strengthened its overall SOA go-to-market position through the introduction of a bundled SOA suite of products, a number of new open source projects, and the introduction of an ISV and enterprise customer-enabling initiative (the Enterprise Acceleration Program). With these moves, Red Hat intends to reach the lofty goal of capturing 50% of all enterprise middleware workloads by 2015.

• Vendor Importance: Very high to Red Hat, because while the firm possesses a number of platforms in support of its portals, telecom services deployment, application servers, and data services, it lacked an integrated platform targeting horizontal SOA solutions – a condition rectified by the release of Red Hat Enterprise SOA Platform, which is expected to reach general availability within 30 days. This platform will allow Red Hat to offer a supported ESB (previously, its ESB was not available with a support contract), increasing the firm’s ability to aggressively compete with pure-play ESB vendors in the open source market, including WS02, MuleSource, Sun, and IONA.

• Market Impact: High on the SOA market, which is experiencing a perfect storm in which open source players have garnered a great deal of market share on the application server and ESB end of the SOA spectrum, while larger, closed source players have undergone a series of consolidating acquisitions. Despite the embryonic nature of some of the announcements made by Red Hat at JBoss World, the firm has further solidified its position as the leading pure open source vendor within the SOA market and it stands well positioned to capitalize upon this perfect storm over both the short and long term.

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Current Perspective

Competitive Positives and Concerns

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