Red Hat (NYSE:RHT), the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, today announced the sponsorship of three new open source community projects that are 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. These projects offer sophisticated capabilities that enterprises can readily leverage to advance open source middleware into their organizations.
“JBoss is strengthening our leadership in the open source community with these initiatives, which are intended to expand the availability of enterprise-level capabilities necessary to advance the growth of open source middleware in organizations," said Craig Muzilla, vice president, Middleware Business at Red Hat. “Viable open source offerings for high-speed transaction processing, SOA governance and management will be key to accelerate customer adoption of open source middleware.”
Introducing the JBoss.org BlackTie project
The JBoss.org BlackTie is a new project for integrating Java and legacy-based distributed transaction-processing environments. BlackTie will complement and extend the current JBoss transaction monitor project, JBoss.org Transactions, through the addition of C, C++ and mainframe compatible transaction capabilities, in an effort to allow organizations to better integrate and migrate these legacy environments with their next-generation, Java-based transaction environments.
The BlackTie project will focus on emulating transaction-processing monitor application programming interfaces (such as BEA's Tuxedo), providing legacy services in an open source capacity, including security, naming, clustering and transactions. This will help ensure that applications formerly dependent on legacy transaction environments, including BEA's Tuxedo, will operate with the JBoss transaction processing features project through the BlackTie framework. This project is intended to give enterprise users the opportunity to easily and transparently integrate their C, C++ and mainframe applications into JBoss Java-based environments.
The JBoss.org BlackTie project is designed to fully support the ATMI programming interface, eliminating the need to replace customer client, server or service code and simplifying customer migration paths.
In time, Red Hat also expects to release a JBoss Enterprise Middleware offering based on the JBoss.org BlackTie and Transaction projects.
Advancing SOA Governance
Red Hat also announces a new initiative designed to address the complex and varied needs of SOA governance. Enterprises seeking agility, reuse, efficiency and cost savings are increasingly adopting service oriented architectures (SOA). To fully realize these benefits, however, a SOA governance strategy and infrastructure is required. Ultimately SOA governance can help organizations manage the behavior of composite applications and how services are developed, deployed and managed throughout their life cycle.
To date, open source SOA governance solutions have been limited. With today's announcement, Red Hat is establishing a direction for the future of open source SOA governance through a series of SOA governance projects on JBoss.org. The SOA governance projects are intended to define a comprehensive approach to SOA governance, beginning with the repository and UDDI registry and working with the open source community and partners to define open and closed source value-add projects and products over time in areas such as policy management and enforcement and related tooling. The first community project under the SOA governance umbrella – the JBoss.org DNA project – is already underway. JBoss.org DNA, the first open source contribution based on Red Hat's April 2007 MetaMatrix acquisition, is expected to provide a full-featured repository that will serve as a SOA governance foundation technology.
Driving the Next-Generation of Open Source Management
Today, Red Hat and Hyperic Inc., a leading open source web infrastructure management software provider, announced and released into the community a jointly developed management platform project, named RHQ. It is anticipated that the RHQ project will serve as the code base for JBoss Operations Network v2.0 (JON 2.0), due out in the Spring of 2008. The RHQ project aims to develop a common services management platform that will be used in future versions of each company’s product offering.
Source code, under the GPL open source license, project information and community forums are accessible at www.rhq-project.org.
JON 2.0 is focused on delivering new features for systems management for larger environments by extending the scalability and reliability of managing the platform. JON 2.0 is also designed to have new features that improve the configuration and manageability of systems. For example, the collection system will be optimized for performance and storage, enabling more metrics while keeping performance consistent. JON 2.0 features improved capabilities to group together large sets of inventories, reducing complexity of managing larger infrastructure environments. JON continues to be an integral component for the middleware solutions JBoss provides to enterprises.
For more information on these JBoss community projects, visit www.jboss.org. For more information on JBoss Enterprise Middleware, visit www.jboss.com.
About Red Hat, Inc.
Red Hat, the world's leading open source solutions provider, is headquartered in Raleigh, NC with over 50 satellite offices spanning the globe. CIOs have ranked Red Hat first for value in Enterprise Software for four consecutive years in the CIO Insight Magazine Vendor Value study. Red Hat provides high-quality, affordable technology with its operating system platform, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, together with applications, management and Services Oriented Architecture (SOA) solutions, including JBoss Enterprise Middleware. Red Hat also offers support, training and consulting services to its customers worldwide. Learn more: http://www.redhat.com.
Forward-Looking Statements
Certain statements contained in this press release may constitute "forward-looking statements" within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Forward-looking statements provide current expectations of future events based on certain assumptions and include any statement that does not directly relate to any historical or current fact. Actual results may differ materially from those indicated by such forward-looking statements as a result of various important factors, including: risks related to the integration of acquisitions; the ability of the Company to effectively compete; the inability to adequately protect Company intellectual property and the potential for infringement or breach of license claims of or relating to third party intellectual property; risks related to data and information security vulnerabilities; ineffective management of, and control over, the Company's growth and international operations; adverse results in litigation; and changes in and a dependence on key personnel as well as other factors contained in our most recent Quarterly Report on Form 10-Q (copies of which may be accessed through the Securities and Exchange Commission's website at http://www.sec.gov), including those found therein under the captions "Risk Factors" and "Management's Discussion and Analysis of Financial Condition and Results of Operations". In addition, the forward-looking statements included in this press release represent the Company's views as of the date of this press release and these views could change. However, while the Company may elect to update these forward-looking statements at some point in the future, the Company specifically disclaims any obligation to do so. These forward-looking statements should not be relied upon as representing the Company's views as of any date subsequent to the date of the press release.