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2007
pfricke

Red Hat's SOA Vision

Posted by pfricke Apr 24, 2007

 

Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) enables enterprises to accelerate business execution while driving higher quality and customer satisfaction. The key to success in business is creating the ability to not only to respond to opportunities and threats, but to identify them as early as possible and drive your vision of your business to a successful delivery of product and service leadership. SOA allows enterprises to do this because it opens up the integration and automation of the value chain built on IT standards.

 

However, despite the significant progress made with open standards in the industry, most SOA platforms are delivered with many proprietary, closed extensions that focus on customer lock-in more so than automation of the value chain. Examples of this include proprietary data formats and extensions to standards that could have been part of the standard, but vendors refused to open up their entire SOA stack. This drives complex, closed and expensive SOA platforms and enterprise deployments.

 

Red Hat believes there is a Better Way. We redefine SOA to be Simple, Open, and Affordable. Many customers are already realizing the benefits of the Open Source Platform for SOA – JBoss Enterprise Middleware. Red Hat's SOA strategy helps customers with four major challenges – development complexity, low IT resource utilization, business process friction, and inadequate user experiences.

 

Today's announcement highlighting the next migration opportunity to an Open Source Architecture is a major step on the journey to Simple, Open, and Affordable SOA. By making it easier for the JBoss.org community to rapidly innovate without the worry of productization cycles, Red Hat enables Java and SOA innovation to develop and mature more quickly. JBoss Enterprise Middleware takes this innovation and packages it into easy to consume platforms and frameworks designed to meet developer, ISV and enterprise SOA challenges. These JBoss Enterprise Middleware products lay the foundation for even greater Red Hat support excellence, customer deployment experiences and satisfaction.

 

The JBoss Enterprise Application Platform helps customers develop and deploy services to fuel their SOA automated business processes. The JBoss Enterprise Application Platform for Portals allows people to leverage and participate in business processes built using SOA techniques, giving them a personalized experience customized for their role in the value chain. The upcoming JBoss SOA Platform, which include JBoss.org projects such as JBoss ESB, JBoss Rules and JBoss jBPM, will bring enterprise SOAs to life by enabling the automated execution of the business and fostering the ability of enterprises to drive their industry to the next level of productivity and achievement.

 

We are pleased with the growth and progress of our JBoss.org community as it continues to build out a complete open source platform for SOA. The community will see its work being used in an ever growing number of customer use cases solving SOA development and deployment problems and opening up the benefits of SOA to a greater number of people and companies. Customers will gain the benefits of open source Simple, Open and Affordable SOA.

 

Red Hat continues to work with partners to deliver simple, open, and affordable SOA to help drive the next migration opportunity: moving legacy application infrastructures to JBoss. With Vitria, we jointly announced bringing the strengths of the two companies together to further this SOA vision. Vitria will bring its business process automation and integration suite, Business Accelerator, together with the JBoss Enterprise Application Platform to deliver a simple, open and affordable SOA-focused business acceleration solution.

 

Vitria has a long history of delivering excellent integration technology that solves advanced enterprise integration challenges. Vitria's strength in Financial Services, Healthcare, Insurance, Manufacturing, Supply Chain and Telecom industries complements Red Hat's focus on enabling businesses to lead their industry and respond in real time to business opportunities and threats.

 

Vitria's Business Accelerator extends the JBoss Enterprise Application Platform with SOA integration capabilities leveraging Vitria's deep expertise in solving enterprise application integration business problems. Building on the openness value proposition of JBoss Enterprise Middleware, Business Accelerator gives Red Hat and Vitria customers choice in enterprise SOA solutions.

 

With many traditional EAI vendors falling by the wayside or being bought out, Vitria's movement toward open source, leveraging the leading open source middleware platform - JBoss Enterprise Middleware - illustrates Vitria's vision and understanding of the power of open source, collaboration and simple, open and affordable SOA. We, at Red Hat, are excited by this collaboration with Vitria and welcome them to the open source community!

 

As I was reading through Shaun's blog discussing OSS penetrating deeper into the enterprise at higher points in the stack, it hit me that traditional license middleware revenue will follow the same curve as mainframes and UNIX operating systems did when those were confronted with paradigm shifts. These products did not die, but they ceased being high growth businesses and became cash cows.

 

Add to that the nonsensical statements emanating out of some of our competitors like - "We don't ever run into JBoss in our customers"; or "JBoss is not really open source". These are the same types of statements made about UNIX and PCs by mainframe-generation IBM executives in the 1980s and by UNIX industry executives made about Linux in the late 1990s. In each case, a few years later...you know the story. Well, technology changes, but people don't change much!

 

So extrapolating out, we get to 2011 or 2012 as the year when we'll see license revenue for middleware (App Servers, Portals, Integration/ESB, Messaging, BPM, etc... collectively) go flat to negative year-over-year. The open source based subscription model will triumph as it provides greater value to customers!

 

P.S. JBoss is deployed in at least 37% of enterprises world wide. And last I checked, the license for most JBoss projects is LGPL which is an OSI blessed license meaning software licensed under the LGPL is "real" open source. A couple of the JBoss projects, such as Drools, are licensed under the ASF open source license. We welcome and encourage your participation in the JBoss.org community!

 

SOA Software is partnering with Red Hat to provide comprehensive governance, security and management of Web Services deployed on JBoss Enterprise Middleware. Together, both companies offerings accelerates simple, open, and affordable SOA solutions for the enterprise.

 

JBoss Application Server hosts an increasing number of services – Java, EJB and web services endpoints – in enterprise SOA deployments. As these services are consumed by an increasing number of applications and business processes, the importance of structured governance becomes critical. SOA Software's SOA Infrastructure Suite, consisting of Service Manager and WorkBench, provides that functionality, including:

  • Authentication and authorization of web services consumers on JBoss Enterprise Middleware
  • Privacy and non-repudiation of Web Service transactions on JBoss Enterprise Middleware
  • Lifecycle management and workflow for Web Services on JBoss Enterprise Middleware
  • Provisioning and contract management for Web Services on JBoss Enterprise Middleware
  • Mediation and interoperability of heterogeneous platforms – between JBoss Enterprise Middleware and other platforms
  • Quality of service for Web Services on JBoss Enterprise Middleware
  • Routing, high-availability, and load-balancing for Web Services on JBoss Enterprise Middleware


 

Customers can use SOA Software Infrastructure Suite with JBoss Application Server today. Later in 2007, SOA Software will extend its support to JBoss ESB.

 

Open Source is moving deeper into SOA deployments. Enterprises want to expand the benefits of SOA to their entire value chain. This goal requires a combination of a mass adopted, simple, open and affordable SOA platform, JBoss Enterprise Middleware, with SOA Software's SOA Management and Security solution.

 

At Red Hat, we welcome SOA Software to our broad and growing ecosystem. We are excited to work with them to help our joint customers offer greater value to their customers and value chain.

View the press release.

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