JBoss founder Marc Fleury left Red Hat last month to pursue other interests after complaining publicly about a lack of R&D investment, but Red Hat’s senior vice president of marketing, Tim Yeaton, insisted that had no impact on the investment boost.
If you look at our R&D investment going into this fiscal year, starting March 1, we’re going to double our R&D investment in JBoss, he said. We’ve had two waves of investment in JBoss, the first went in to field service, support and sales. Now we’re at the second wave, which is around the technology.
Yeaton pointed to the recent deal with Exadel to open source its rich client development tools via the JBoss developer portal as evidence of investment in the JBoss portfolio, adding that the company would also be investing in enterprise service bus, business process management, service-oriented architecture, portal and rules technologies.
Asked about Fleury’s former complaints about investment levels, Yeaton insisted that the JBoss founder had left Red Hat for his on reasons, and maintained that Red Hat was taking a controlled approach to investment. We needed to get past the integration and build out the go-to-market capabilities as a priority, he said.
