JBoss Grows Up

The force behind the self-proclaimed "professional open source" strategy has had its rite of passage and is now entering adulthood as a division of Red Hat.

At the JBoss World conference here, Marc Fleury, founder of JBoss and now senior vice president of the JBoss division of Red Hat, said JBoss is poised to move ahead as part of Red Hat and will continue to take a leadership role in driving open-source middleware into the enterprise.

"Weve closed the transaction, and the money has moved," Fleury quipped during a press conference at JBoss World, which is running through June 15.

Fleury was referring to Red Hats acquisition of JBoss, which closed June 5. This years JBoss World marks the debut of JBoss as a division of Red Hat, a match that Fleury, many of his individual project leaders and Red Hat officials refer to as "a perfect fit."

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Moreover, at the conference JBoss is making several announcements, including its move into the systems management space with an open source strategy, the general availability of the JBoss Seam framework and new certification for SAAS (software-as-a-service) applications, among other things.

How does IBM feel about the Red Hat-JBoss deal? Click here to find out.

Fleury said JBoss will open-source the core systems management agent in JBoss ON (Operations Network) to create and drive adoption of the companys open management platform.

JBoss will pursue an open-source strategy of promoting open agents, building a community and encouraging pervasiveness of its management platform, he said.

"We are going to open-source parts of the JBoss Management Network starting with the agents," he said. "We are going to open-source the agent architecture and go after the distribution model."

JBoss also will support Nagios agents, according to Fleury. Nagios is a major open-source management initiative. "Were going to build a community of agents around this open-source base," he said.

Fleury said the JBoss open-source enterprise management strategy is important in putting customers in charge of their IT infrastructures.

Red Hat CEO Matt Szulik talks about the ramifications of the JBoss deal and the potential partner fallout. Click here to read the interview.

"Today, JBoss ON provides our customers with powerful management and monitoring capabilities for their Java and JEMS [JBoss Enterprise Middleware Suite]-based applications," said Rich Friedman, director of product management at JBoss, in a statement. "Now, were opening up JBoss ON to create a broad enterprise management solution that extends across platforms and middleware. Our open-source strategy around the agent will deliver a seamless management environment that works with any management system and brings more choice to our customers."

Moreover, Fleury said, in the long term JBoss ON and Red Hat Network will be brought together to form a unified management platform for customers of Red Hat Enterprise Linux and JBoss JEMS.

Next Page: "A sigh of relief."