The announcement of CentraSite Community Edition accompanies a new release of the flagship Enterprise Edition, which adds UDDI 3.0 support using predefined metadata models, a J2EE JAX-R interface with publish/subscribe (PubSub) capability, and an Eclipse-compliant registry browser.
Behind the announcement is an unusual joint product development alliance between the companies. Although both overlapped in middleware, they have different regional strengths (Fujitsu in Asia/Pacific, and Software AG in Europe, followed by North America). Furthermore, they had complementary capabilities, with Fujitsu contributing business process management while Software AG adding legacy integration.
The result is an ESB offering that ties in middleware offerings from both providers, including Fujitsu’s BPM-focused Interstage Suite and Software AG’s legacy integration-focused crossvision SOA suite. Additionally, CentraSite bundles in a UDDI 3.0 registry. Given that ESBs themselves are becoming commodities, neither company is competing on the ESB alone. Instead, it’s what they layer atop it.
CentraSite has been openly designed for complete loosely coupled integration, and solutions from other top-tier SOA solution providers.
For instance, the BPM integration supplements the UDDI registry by giving developers and designers a look, not only at the relatively cryptic WSDL process descriptions, but also the process diagrams themselves.
That’s where the community edition comes in. Like rivals, who are using community or express editions to seed the market, Fujitsu and Software AG hope the community edition will get their feet in the door with a free product.
It’s part of a more formal community that Fujitsu and Software AG are rolling out, which will also offer case studies and best practices, discussion forums and blogs, surveys, and webinars.
But in this case, don’t confuse community with open source. The Community Edition may be free, and sponsorship in the community may also be free. But you have to be an enrolled sponsor to actually participate in architecture committees that will guide future product development.
Fujitsu and Software AG have gotten 15 vendors to sign up as sponsors. The best known include run time governance provider AmberPoint; security providers Forum Systems, Layer 7; business process modeler IDS Scheer; business rules management provider ILOG; and web services testing providers Mindreef and Parasoft.
Although sponsors are invited to redistribute CentraSite Community Edition directly, for now all Keith Swenson, a R&D VP for Fujitsu, one of the sponsors might be interested in bundling the community edition with their install DVD.
