The driver was the realization that over 30% of JBoss paid customers are on Dell platforms. Dell signed after JBoss camped out in Austin for several months.
What’s in it for Dell? According to vice president of corporate strategy and development Bob Bickel, it was the need to have an answer to IBM’s WebSphere Express offering.
They [Dell] have an enterprise sales force that sometimes go head to head with IBM. They wanted to have a middleware stack that they could offer on the Java side, he said.
Since JBoss signed HP as the first platform VAR a year ago, channel sales overall have grown to account for 10% of JBoss’s paid business.
Besides platform VARs, specialized solution providers such as McKesson (which offers a medical supplies order replenishment system), several telco equipment providers, Mercury, Teradata, JDA, CA, Kronos and others are selling embedded versions JBoss inside their products.
Placing it all in perspective, the company, which also makes its product available for free download minus support, estimates that 2 to 4% of its customers are anteing up for annual support subscriptions.
JBoss expects the VAR channel to account for up to 30% of subscription business next year, and 60 to 70% ultimately.
