The Raleigh North Carolina-based company has acquired MetaMatrix for an undisclosed fee and will make use of its data management software as a means to drive the use of JBoss middleware within service oriented architecture environments.
According to Red Hat, the MetaMatrix technology decouples applications from their data sources and makes valuable data assets available as services in an SOA, freeing data from single application silos.
As such it will provide the data migration layer that will help Red Hat customers move from legacy applications to the brave new world of SOA and — Red Hat hopes — subscription revenue for the JBoss Java middleware it acquired last year.
The MetaMatrix software is proprietary, so Red Hat’s first task will be to move it to a subscription model, followed by an open source license, according to Tim Yeaton, Red Hat SVP of enterprise solutions. Much like we did with the Netscape Directory, it’s our intent to have all the technology available under and open source license, he said, noting that the process should take less than a year.
Red Hat will also then look at promoting the MetaMatrix technology through its new JBoss.org development community and JBoss Enterprise Platform subscription offerings, which were also announced yesterday.
As expected, the new strategy for JBoss means that it will provide differentiated community and enterprise offerings, repeating the Linux model that sees Red Hat offering Fedora as an unsupported Linux distribution to its community of developers, and building the supported Red Hat Enterprise Linux on a snapshot of the Fedora code.
We were trying to do too much, trying to serve two masters if you will, said Shaun Connolly, vice president of product management, noting that the revamped JBoss.org community would allow developers to focus on innovation, while Red Hat packages the results into platform bundles for enterprise use.
We want to do that [innovate at JBoss.org] freed up from the productization cycle that comes with our enterprise platforms, he said, adding that the new enterprise packages would also simplify things for enterprises. We’re doing all the integration work ourselves for our customers.
The first of the new enterprise offerings is the JBoss Enterprise Application Platform, which includes JBoss Application Server, Hibernate for object/relational mapping and persistence, and JBoss Seam for next-generation applications.
Future JBoss Enterprise Platform offerings will be available for portal applications, SOA integration and business process automation requirements. We want to innovate in open source and create enterprise platform distributions from those components that are ready for enterprise use, said Connolly.
Also coming in the summer is Red Hat Developer Studio, a development environment that integrates the Eclipse-based tools Red Hat gained via its recent agreement with Exadel with existing JBoss and Red Hat Enterprise developer tools.
We want to make sure we appeal to developers as early in the development process as possible, said Connolly, as he also announced new Red Hat Developer Support Subscriptions designed to help both corporate developers and independent software vendors (ISVs) ramp up their SOA, Java, and Linux development projects.
The new support subscriptions offer guaranteed service levels, unlimited support inquiries, and cover all JBoss Enterprise and Red Hat Enterprise Linux offerings.
What we’re doing with this set of announcements, and those of RHEL 5, is lay out our end to end open source infrastructure model, said Yeaton.
Additionally, Yeaton also confirmed the company’s plans to open source its Red Hat Network systems management offering as its integrates features from JBoss’s similar Operations Network offering. Our intent is, as we move to the next generation of Red Hat Network, to get to an open source-style license, but that will be as we evolve Red Hat Network, he said.
