In 2005, not long after I joined JBoss, we began working to define a strategy to deliver a next generation SOA Platform to the enterprise and mass markets to expand the opportunity for businesses to leverage SOA integration and business process automation. We talked with customers and potential partners throughout the process and in mid-2006 embarked on a strategy that leveraged existing and mature Jboss.org open source projects, customer contributions (including a major existing custom ESB donation that had been running for over 3 years at the time, and the open source community at large. JBoss ESB 4.0 made its debut at the end of 2006 and was followed up by a 2nd generation ESB in August 2007, JBoss ESB 4.2. JBoss ESB 4.2 became the platform for our early adopter program which has about a dozen enterprises spanning multiple industries such as transportation, financial, manufacturing, government and others. The JBoss productization team then turned their attention to delivering an enterprise ready and consumable JBoss Enterprise SOA Platform 4.2 announced today, February 14 2008 with planned delivery by the end of the month.

Unlike other open source ESBs which are developer frameworks, the JBoss Enterprise SOA Platform is a comprehensive 2nd generation SOA integration and business automation platform. As described with the delivery of JBoss ESB 4.2, the JBoss Enterprise SOA Platform brings together several integration technologies to enable enterprises to leverage past investments while building new modern SOA integration solutions. These integration technologies include enterprise application integration (EAI), SOA integration with an ESB, business event management with JBoss ESB's event-driven architecture (EDA). Further, with JBoss jBPM, business processes and workflows may be automated and finally, JBoss Rules is designed to enable complex event processing in the next release of JBoss Rules and the JBoss Enterprise SOA Platform.

Having these technologies integrated into a single, enterprise distribution improves productivity of developers and IT overall. The SOA Platform is designed to be very flexible, enabling small, focused ESB deployments that may be federated across the enterprise with out requiring an application server. Leveraging JBoss Enterprise Application Platform, the JBoss Enterprise SOA Platform can take advantage of advanced clustering and JEE features to enable a highly scalable integration deployment. It is this combination of past, present and future integration technologies coupled with great deployment flexibility that define the 2nd generation SOA Platform.

We welcome our SOA JBoss Advanced Partners – ActiveEndpoints, AmberPoint, iWay Software, SeeWhy, SOA Software and Vitria. These and future partners add significant value to Red Hat-based SOA deployments on JBoss Enterprise Middleware.

We look forward to working with our customers to help them deploy this new, advanced SOA Platform to help improve their businesses. Our growing community continues to innovate with future projects in complex event processing and SOA Governance starting with JBoss DNA, an open source repository project. We have the new Red Hat SOA resource center available for further information. Stay tuned. It will be fun, and for our customers, productive and profitable!