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.

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!