JBoss Portal 2.6 builds on the JBoss open source tradition of collaboration with our users, customers and developer community simplifying user interaction and participation in service-oriented-architecture-enabled business processes. JBoss Portal continues to see expanding deployment in customer service and intranet portal deployments where a simpler, more open and affordable platform is required. The telecommunications, financial services, government and other industries see the benefits of using open source software to add value to their SOA deployments by delivering to human business process participants a personalized experience improving their productivity doing their jobs.

The main themes of JBoss Portal 2.6 community developed enhancements include the following:

• Advanced Personalization – JBoss Portal has had user personalization of individual portlets since the JBoss Portal 2.0. In JBoss Portal 2.6, We've improved the granularity of personalization and ability to further personalize the user experience. Personal user dashboards bring personalized themes, layouts and portlet content increasing the productivity of specific roles and people within a business process or collaboration effort. Further enhancements include user created user interfaces, drag and drop portlets and more granular controlled access at the portlet level.
• Usability Improvements – The open source community including customers provided outstanding input to improve the usability of JBoss Portal which, as with all software, is an ongoing development. The open source difference means that this happens in a transparent manner with JBoss Portal. Improvements include portal and user administration as well as content management. Portlets may be managed overall or for individual instances including default definition. User administration simplifies user creation, provides a list based view and includes user search. Basic content management provided out of the box now includes action-based management within a familiar directory view.
• Content Management System (CMS) Workflow – JBoss jBPM provides content management approval workflow in a configurable process that enables or disables this role-based approval capability.
• Additional Web Services for Remote Portlets (WSRP) Support – WSRP support offers expanded functionality beyond the basic producer and consumer profiles. We've added implicit cloning capability to both the producer and consumer. The advanced WSRP profiles are also supported in JBoss Portal 2.6.
• Identity – Until JBoss 2.6 developers had to write customer JAAS modules to integrate with LDAP. With JBoss 2.6 developers have pre-built integration with LDAP server. Supported servers include Red Hat Directory Server, OpenDS, and OpenLDAP. Portal 2.6 not only provides LDAP integration but an overall simplified architecture for your enterprise directories.
• Google Gadgets - Google Gadgets are mini-applications that work with the Google homepage, Google Desktop, or any page on the web. They can range from simple HTML to complex applications, and can be a calendar, a weather globe, a media player. It is simple to write new custom gadgets. JBoss Portal 2.6 provides a simplified way to drop any of these pre-built gadgets as portlets.

We are excited about the possibilities for customers and users to improve user experiences with JBoss Portal 2.6. In particular, the personalization, usability, identity and WSRP enhancements take JBoss Portal to a new level that was driven by our customers and community for their own use. Check out JBoss Portal and create better user experiences for you and your users today!

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!

In November 2006, Red Hat rolled out its Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) strategy by redefining SOA to be Simple, Open and Affordable. We highlighted four customer challenges that Red Hat takes on with low-cost, high-value SOA solutions. These challenges included:

1. Development complexity,
2. Low IT resource utilization,
3. Business process friction, and
4. Inadequate user experiences.

The Red Hat Enterprise Linux and JBoss Enterprise Middleware Platforms and Frameworks take on these challenges on our customers’ behalf enabling them to build simple, open and affordable SOAs to improve business execution and results.

Today, with the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 announcement, we expand on the solutions to the second challenge – improving low IT resource utilization. Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5’s advanced virtualization features are ideal for securely and reliably dealing with the widely variable workloads that an SOA may present to the underlying operating system and hardware resources. SOA deployments open up IT assets to a much wider range of users including customers, partners and employees in such a manner that the demands upon the systems are unpredictable and may come in sharp spikes. Rather than deploy a battery of unused hardware “just-in-case” a new promotion is more popular than anticipated or you release major news, deploy your SOA services and business process middleware on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 taking advantage of its virtualization capabilities. JBoss Enterprise Middleware is tuned in conjunction with Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 for just these types of scenarios. The Red Hat Application Stack will be updated in the future to include Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5, making it a perfect solution for SOA services development and deployment.

How does Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 virtualization optimize SOA deployments? Three areas come to mind:

1. Abstraction isolates the operating system and the SOA services and processes from the underlying hardware. It is easy to build a SOA service andrndeploy as many copies as are needed for workload management, availability and security reasons.
2. Isolation provided by virtualization allows SOA services and processes to be hosted in individual containers. Each container can be run on a system without any concern about it taking the system down, exploiting other containers from a security point-of-view or causing other SOA services, processes and applications to fail.
3. Flexibility enabled by live migration, coupled with virtualization allows IT to move running instances of SOA services and processes around without any noticeable user disruption. IT can load balance, offload, and move SOA services and processes away from failing systems.

We are excited about Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 and JBoss Enterprise Middleware’s capabilities to improve customers’ SOA experiences Simply Openly, and Affordably.

To learn more about SOA, visit here.

It's been a great ride and experience for me at JBoss and before working with Marc and JBoss as an analyst. I first heard of JBoss through Bruce Perens who gave me some feedback on a summer 2001 LinuxWorld presentation I was preparing on OSS moving up the stack. I started hearing about JBoss from clients in mid 2002 and got on Marc Fleury's calendar to learn about what was happening here. I remember the technical presentation well...and thought, brilliant people...now with just some business focus, they will win. Met Marc and Ben Sabrin at the .org Pavilion at LinuxWorld NYC Winter 2003. When Bob Bickel joined in 2003, it was a done deal for me. JBoss, if they did not throw it away, would lead the Application Server space and have a platform for moving further up the stack over time. JBoss had the "aura of inevetibility" where a technology gets a positive virtuous adoption cycle and becomes the leader.

I did a couple of Customer Advisory Boards and discussed the industry, customers and competitors with Marc offline and threw my name in the hat to help him grow the business. After making me work during my interview process (and paying me for it :-)), I climbed aboard this rocketship in April 2005.

It's been quite a learning experience working with Marc...he reminds me of two notable IBM Fellows I worked for in previous days - Andy Heller and Larry Loucks. Never a dull moment with any of these guys! I always appreciated the way Marc would manage by walking around, keeping up with his development team, the strategy, the market, etc... In addition to technical and business strategy, Marc appreciated the power of winning the "air war", ensuring JBoss was always visible, outflanking larger competitors and delivering the highest customer satisfaction. This is especially important for a startup and Marc "got it".

Marc will certainly make some great contributions down the pike, I'm certain. We discussed the grand challenges of the 21st century - energy and biology. His background is ideal to make major contributions in these areas if he chooses so. So far, cancer research is one of his things...he amazed me with the state of progress in that arena. Help cure cancer, Marc!

Of course, we are here at Red Hat carrying on that winning tradition Marc started. I hope he stops by from time to time. Good luck in your new endeavors. Then, of course, there is always Web 3.0...I'm staying tuned.

When JBoss acquired the Drools project in Oct 2005, I was pondering how to position it within the JEMS suite and in support of SOA. Lot's of interesting thing occured throughout 2006 as we made a lot of progress with JBoss Rules 3.0, the productized version of the Drools project. In particular, one thing that jumps out is the increased interest in business rules engines and how they can help a business perform better. It has become clear the JBoss Rules can increase business agility and responsiveness by building a modular business policy architecture using rules.

I attended the executive session at the Washington DC Business Rules Forum in November 2006. There, several industry leaders including the CIO for Centerpoint Energy, rules architects from other energy companies and a division VP from JP Morgan Chase. Interesting points that were made included the improved productivity by using a rules engine to host business policies for energy allocation and running the energy business at large. One mentioned how they went from 3-4 months response time to regulation change to 2 days! Another mentioned that a rules engine coupled with an event repository (or log) was the key breakthrough to solving their Sarbanes-Oxley challenges. SOX in a BOX, so to speak :-). Indeed, JBoss ESB, coupled with JBoss jBPM and JBoss Rules will solve this problem far more easily and affordably than today's cobbled together multi-vendor solutions. The other interesting thing mentioned was that while the traditional close source rules engines had good capability, they cost way too much and were too "heavy" for many uses within the enterprises. JBoss Rules did not exist during their deployment, but in the future .... Drooling for Jboss Rules :-).

Another area of interest (kind of along the lines of SOX in a BOX) is the use of business rules in an SOA. This is an important area of focus for us at JBoss to bring a leading innovation SOA platform to solve high value business problems. Stay tuned.

There is a lot of interest in JBoss jBPM and JBoss Rules used together in various customer scenarios. See my Enterprise Open Source Journal article which describes how business process (JBoss jBPM) and business rules (JBoss Rules) are being used in some of our customers.

There is community interest around Rules in a .NET environment.

Finally, the JBoss Rules product is attracting partner and competitor interest as there is no open source altnerative. We love our partners and certified partners for JBoss Rules have great opportunities. OTOH, BPM and ESB competitors that are not certified....can they really meet service level agreements on a complex technology as a rules engine? Clearly there is a lot of demand and interest in JBoss Rules!

2007 will see more great things for JBoss Rules....stay tuned.

What is service-oriented architecture, or SOA? Why is SOA important? How do Red Hat and JBoss products support SOA? How does one get started?

So first, let’s start with what is service-oriented architecture, or S-O-A or SOA, as some people may call it. From a business perspective, SOA focuses on developing IT assets and applications in a business process focused manner. And this in turn is focusing on improving the way a business executes business processes and improving the way one leverages IT assets in a business process. SOA is all about focusing business application development to deliver business services which are then consumed by business processes.

From a technical perspective, people will think of SOA, first of all, as services that then can be published out of your application and IT fabric. SOAs are built by first publishing application assets as services. These services then can be more rapidly configured into business processes; they can be integrated through enterprise service buses (ESBs) and re-used to support multiple processes at the same time in a manner that is more efficient. The SOA approach to development takes embedded functionality and exposing it, publishing a service for multiple actors to utilize in a business process.

Why is a service-oriented architecture important? One of the key value propositions for SOA revolves around business competitiveness. So if a business is eliminating unnecessary manual pain points leveraging SOA techniques in a business process, e.g., situations in a business process where human interaction is required, but there’s no value-add, they are building a competitive advantage over other competitors.

There are many points where people in an enterprise taking a fax from somewhere and then typing it into another system or they’re looking on one screen and then typing into another system. They may be on the phone and the information they’re receiving is really just essentially filling out a form that could have been done online. And then they put it online and then someone else gets on the phone and then gets a fax and then there are all of these manual pain points that slow a business down, add costs and inject error.

This is business process friction which causes quality issues. Business process friction causes a business to be slow to react to competitive situations or opportunities. And what SOA basically does is it improves the ability of an enterprise to remove those business pain points. SOA enables this pain relief since the SOA publishes these IT application assets as services that can be consumed and reconfigured to support different business processes, eliminating those human non-value-added points.

When an enterprise eliminates the human interaction in a business process that doesn’t add value and focus on human interaction that adds value, they speed up business process execution. SOA-based business process automation also eliminates the quality issues of the business process friction that are present in many enterprises. If a competitor down the street is implementing business processes using service-oriented architecture and you’re still in that manual pain point business process friction world, they are going to outrun you and you’re going to be in trouble.

So how does Red Hat and JBoss products support SOA? There are three levels to many SOA deployments.

Services are published out of an application platform to be consumed by business processes and process participants. The Red Hat Application Stack includes JBoss Application Server and makes an excellent SOA services hosting platform. Many Red Hat customers take their business process logic that’s hosted on a JBoss Application Server and publishing it as services into their SOA. These services are perhaps published as web services, perhaps as Enterprise Java Bean (EJB) endpoints, or whatever technology makes the most sense. These services become useable by other services and business processes. Example of a service include: a tax calculation service, a service to update the payroll in a certain set of circumstances, a services that retrieves certain kinds of information about a traveler and bring it back and publish that information, or a services that executes an algorithmic calculation for determining the validity or desirability of investing in certain stocks. So these things are published in a way that can be consumed by other IT assets in the business or by partners for that matter. JBoss ESB is the open source SOA integration platform that brings the SOA together, integrating the services with data sources and with other services and applications. It will support JBoss Messaging as its high performance transport layer along with other industry messaging platforms and protocols.

The second level which lies above the services hosting platform is the process layer. The process layer enables the automation of business process execution andd human interaction with a business process. Business processes can be codified in products like JBoss jBPM. JBoss jBPM is a software package that manages the workflow within a business process, interacting with those services leveraging BPEL, the Business Process Execution Language, or jPDL, the jBPM Process Definition Language, for the Java-based services that are exposed or processes encoded within a Java application. Processes can be codified in the appropriate process language in jBPM to interact with these various services, using these services in a business process flow that’s natural to the business. Once a process is setup in jBPM leveraging the SOA services, and a business change event occurs, IT can reconfigure the jBPM process to accommodate the change more easily than with stovepipe applications, leveraging those same services or other services. JBoss Rules adds value to the business process layer by enabling complex business rules to more easily guide the behavior of process actors and decisions.

The third layer is presentation. Obviously there is human interaction with the process; human interaction that adds value remains critical in a business process. Businesses want to eliminate non-value-added human interaction. So JBoss Portal is an example or a product and presentation framework which may present business forms or guide other types of human interaction within the SOA deployment. JBoss Portal also manages the submission of information or may guide approval process flows people will get involved in the business process. JBoss Seam is another highly product enterprise development framework for Web 2.0 presentation within an SOA.

So how does one get started? A major starting point is to really understand your business processes and where you’re having business process friction pain points. Look for processes that are not running well or have lots of non-value human interaction going on. Those are really the good processes to start with. Pick a process like that that has lots of interactions that could be automated.

Red Hat partners help build enterprise SOAs with business services and value-added services. Services include service-oriented architecture envisioning, envision your business, helping you identify those good get started opportunities; and services to identify what kind of assets now in your IT shop can then be deployed as services. Finally, there are services available through partners that enable you to build an SOA. Additionally, partners offer ongoing manageability of the SOA as well.

Red Hat, through Red Hat Enterprise Linux with virtualization, the Red Hat Application Stack, and JEMS, the open source platform for SOA, enables a low-cost, easy on-ramp to SOA.