Tapping Your Hidden Development Resources

An Ask the Expert feature with Opennet

David Allinson gives Business Management the lowdown on open source middleware software.

JBOSS is the leading open source middleware software supplier and competes in a market traditionally dominated by Websphere (IBM) and Web Logic (BEA/Oracle). CIOs considering this critical area of the enterprise computing may think that JBOSS represents an unknown and unproven alternative to their more traditional suppliers. However, we have seen evidence that these organisations are (quite often) sitting on JBOSS expertise that they did not know about.

Earlier this year, at JBOSS World, it was announced that JBOSS had recorded 20 million downloads of its products. Ten million of these were recorded in the last five years and a further 10 million after its acquisition by Red Hat in 2006. As an open source company, JBOSS has a very large development community and continues to make a free version of its products available to this (open source) community however such a huge number of downloads indicates that there are many Java developers (and not just in the open source community) using this enterprise middleware solution spread across the market.

Its acquisition by Red Hat led to the creation of an enterprise-ready version of JBOSS, which was fully documented and fully tested so that the widely acclaimed JBOSS technologies could be deployed with confidence by enterprise customers. This is made available on a subscription basis where the software continues to be free but the customer pays for support testing and quality assurance.

Since the acquisition, Red Hat has come across many customers whose software developers were working with JBOSS for proto-typing but chose to go with one of the proprietary suppliers when it came to production implementation. If CIOs from large enterprises checked with their development team, they might be surprised to see their exposure to JBOSS.

However, whether or not they already have the in-house skills CIOs may derive many other benefits from a move to JBOSS. The open source model plays out particularly well when it comes to the implementation of middleware projects. In the area of system integration it is particularly useful to be able to view first hand how a vendor has approached and implemented features and standards with access to source code.

There is also the benefit of rapid product innovation with a global team of contributors working on the JBOSS product enhancement and assisting each other in projects. Many times the community will also provide its own technical support and troubleshooting to resolve issues encountered in a development project.

The open source subscription model also offers a major incentive to the vendor to provide excellent support services since it is this and not the software itself for which fees are being received.

Finally, freedom from software license fees reduces the cost of JBOSS middleware projects considerably. For example, a portal implementation using JBOSS can be achieved for less than half of the cost of the same project using one of the proprietary competitive products.
So if you are faced with a decision on where to go for your next enterprise middleware project first look in-house and then contact us to further your evaluation.

David Allinson is the General Manager for Opennet MEA, the authorised master distributor and certified training centre for Red Hat products in Middle East and Africa. Allinson is responsible for the running of its Middle East operations. He brings over 25 years of experience in growing and developing businesses and creating winning strategies to strengthen their position in their individual markets. For further information email sales@opennet.ae.