JBoss Accelerates Enterprise Adoption of Open Source Middleware

Red Hat (NYSE: RHT), the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, today announced the “Enterprise Acceleration” initiative designed to help its enterprise customers accelerate their transition to a next-generation, open source middleware architecture based on JBoss Enterprise Middleware. The strategy focuses on expanding the JBoss Enterprise Middleware portfolio, growing the partner ecosystem, sponsoring new projects in the open source community and introducing new resources to ensure enterprise-class performance and interoperability.

“JBoss is already well-established in the developer community and has gained significant corporate adoption,” said Craig Muzilla, vice president, Middleware Business at Red Hat. “We are now focused on expanding further into the enterprise with a comprehensive, open source middleware portfolio and programs to ensure confidence and success of mission-critical applications.”

Driven by dissatisfaction with inflexible, monolithic and low-value proprietary middleware offerings, enterprises are increasingly looking to expand the value they've experienced with open source infrastructure and application servers such as Red Hat Enterprise Linux and JBoss Enterprise Application Platform. Subsequently, many enterprises are now establishing comprehensive open source middleware reference architectures to deliver the applications and services that their businesses demand, at a rapid pace and within a cost structure that allows them to scale their business, not just their infrastructure.

"Our initial project with JBoss Enterprise Middleware has been such a resounding success in terms of meeting our performance requirements and the level of professional support we received from JBoss that the Swedish Police Board is planning on migrating a further four large IT systems to the open source architecture in 2008, of which JBoss Enterprise Middleware is a key part, with another 15 new projects in the pipeline," said Per-Ola Sjöswärd, executive IT strategist at the Swedish National Police Board.

“As open source adoption grows, particularly within the middleware market, we are excited to see our ongoing partnership with JBoss better our ability to deliver open source products and support open standards,” said Anthony Gold, vice president and general manager of the Open Source Business at Unisys. “Unisys’ ongoing relationship with JBoss ensures that our enterprise customers can implement cost-effective and customizable solutions with the confidence that JBoss support provides.”

“Vivat has established a core base of Fortune 1000 customers. We are standardizing on the JBoss portfolio to meet the demands of our enterprise customer,” said Max Yankelevich, Chief Architect at Vivat. “The demand for open source is clear: We are betting on open source to build our business, and our customers are betting on open source to drive down costs in middleware.”

The Enterprise Acceleration initiative consists of:

Comprehensive Enterprise Middleware Portfolio

The core of Enterprise Acceleration is JBoss Enterprise Middleware, a comprehensive portfolio of open source, Java-based middleware products for developing and hosting applications and services, aggregating and presenting content, integrating data and integrating and orchestrating services within SOA. JBoss Enterprise Platforms are all built with the same flexible, lightweight architecture, and each platform integrates components for their specific use case, including application server, enterprise service bus (ESB), application development frameworks, business process management, rules and workflow processing, data integration and portal capabilities. JBoss Enterprise Platforms include the JBoss Enterprise Application Platform, JBoss Enterprise Portal Platform and MetaMatrix Enterprise Data Services Platform. To further accelerate the ongoing adoption of open source middleware, we are expanding our portfolio to include the JBoss Enterprise SOA Platform. We are also introducing new community projects that are expected to become future JBoss Enterprise Middleware platforms or platform components.

Enterprise Products – From Community Development to JBoss Enterprise

Middleware integrates innovative open source community projects into enterprise-class, hardened distributions that deliver all the innovation, flexibility and value of open source, backed by JBoss' rigorous testing and certification efforts. JBoss Enterprise Platforms and Frameworks are subject to a thorough quality-assurance process where a series of compatibility, integration, functionality, security and performance tests are conducted. When all release criteria and testing requirements have been met, certified distributions, including source code, are made available via packages and JBoss Enterprise Middleware subscriptions. Subscriptions also include support, patches and updates, documentation and a multi-year maintenance policy. The JBoss Enterprise Middleware development model enables enterprises to accelerate their deployment of stable enterprise open source middleware with confidence.

Enterprise Acceleration Center

Red Hat is creating a resource center for Enterprise Acceleration to help accelerate the transition to next-generation, open source middleware architectures required to deliver applications and services, at a rapid pace and within a cost structure that enables IT to scale their business, not just their infrastructure. The goal of the Enterprise Acceleration Center is to consolidate the best practices, services and expertise needed to maximize performance, accelerate migration, ensure interoperability, certify solutions and ease adoption of JBoss Enterprise Middleware. Key elements currently planned include:

• Performance Tuning Lab – performance benchmarking, testing, best practice guides Interoperability Lab – interoperability testing with other environments and products
• Live Certification Center – ISV and customers can test their applications on JBoss Enterprise Middleware and proactively adapt to new releases
• Migration Lab – processes, partners, services and best practices to transition from other software to JBoss Enterprise Middleware

In addition to helping customers, the Enterprise Acceleration Center also will also benefit our valued partner ecosystem by enabling JBoss Solution Partners and System Integrator Partners to accelerate the delivery of solutions based on JBoss Enterprise Middleware.

For more information about Red Hat’s Enterprise Acceleration initiative, or about JBoss Enterprise Middleware products, please 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.

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