Iona acquired LogicBlaze, an open source middleware firm, in April. At that time Iona noted that it had been incorporating LogicBlaze’s technology into its Celtix open source ESB for some time, but also made the acquisition to give it some additional open source DNA.
But while Iona has already moved Celtix from the ObjectWeb community to Apache, and now appears to be favoring the LogicBlaze’s FUSE ESB over Celtix, Larry Alston, general manager of open source at Iona, insisted that Celtix has not been dumped completely in favor of the FUSE ESB.
To say that would be plain wrong, Alston said. Celtix had become CXF in Apache, and CXF is one of the underpinning projects in FUSE too. If anything, we’re fusing Celtix and LogicBlaze.
Iona said the new FUSE products include the FUSE ESB, based on the Apache ServiceMix project; the FUSE Message Broker, based on the Apache ActiveMQ project; FUSE Services Framework (formerly Celtix Advanced Service Engine), based on the Apache CXF project and the FUSE Mediation Router, based on the Apache Camel project.
Alston said that Iona will ensure that all of the products are interoperable with each other as well as with its commercial Artix ESB product, and it will also do all the requisite testing and certification.
Alston said the firm is counting on making revenue from its open source projects this year, though that is expected to be mostly from FUSE training, support and services rather than companies upgrading from the free FUSE to the commercial Artix. He said that his open source group at Iona has a separate P&L, sales force, and development team.
Iona is also introducing a new community-driven web site, open.iona.com, to provide FUSE users with supporting resources.
With IONA FUSE, we are giving our customers a powerful open source option for deploying core SOA functionality in distributed, Java-centric environments, Alston added.
