The Raleigh, North Carolina-based company has signed up to the IVA, which was launched in November 2006 by Microsoft with 25 other software and hardware vendors to ensure that their offerings are able to interoperate with Microsoft’s Windows operating system and applications.
As well as the likes of BEA, Business Objects, Citrix, Software AG, and Quest Software, the IVA membership also included a number of open source vendors Microsoft had partnered with, including Novell, Sun, SugarCRM, and XenSource.
A notably absentee was Red Hat’s JBoss division, which was actually the first open source specialist to enter into a partnership with Microsoft in November 2005 when it was still an independent Java middleware vendor.
Red Hat has now joined the IVA, although it appears its interests do not lie beyond ensuring JBoss continues to work well with Windows. Now, Red Hat can extend and deepen interoperability beyond standards to the native level on Windows for its JBoss Enterprise Middleware, it stated.
Red Hat’s membership of the IVA indicates that it is prepared to work with Microsoft, albeit on its own terms. The company previously rejected Microsoft’s offer to repeat its interoperability and patent deal with Novell Inc as an innovation tax.
Red Hat also noted some successes from the JBoss/Microsoft partnership, such as the World Wide Web Consortium WS-Addressing specification and the Hibernate certification for Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Java Database Connectivity driver.
