Red Hat and JBoss make a play for enterprise middleware

Red Hat is using JBoss World 2008 in Orlando as a launching pad for a new service-oriented architecture (SOA) platform designed to accelerate the deployment of open-source middleware by larger enterprises.

SOAs are system architectures of collaborating services that can be used to allow software resources to be addressed using standardized request/response protocols through a network. Because SOAs are not monolithic operating constructs that are rooted to old, inflexible infrastructures, it's often more cost-effective for businesses to construct new and more adaptable applications around simpler, more discrete protocols.

Although SOA technology doesn't seem like it would have an impact on average computer users, developers and IT managers are able to work more efficiently while having access to a stable architecture in which they can easily work in.

The JBoss Enterprise SOA Platform was designed to be an open source solution created for SOA and other business-process applications in one distribution. Furthermore, the service allows IT managers to properly scale and simplify applications, along with the development of a higher quality, faster customer experience.

"The JBoss Enterprise SOA Platform brings together several integration technologies to enable enterprises to leverage past investments while building new modern SOA integration solutions," Director of Product Management Pierre Fricke wrote in his official JBoss blog. "These integration technologies include enterprise application integration (EAI), SOA integration with an ESB, [and] business event management with JBoss ESB's event-driven architecture (EDA). Further, with JBoss jBPM, business processes and workflows may be automated and finally, JBoss Rules is designed to enable complex event processing in the next release of JBoss Rules and the JBoss Enterprise SOA Platform."

The Red Hat-owned division has been working on a solution to deliver a proper SOA platform to the market since 2005, but didn't officially start the project until the middle of 2006. Since then, JBoss has worked with partners in the open source community to discover what types of services they wanted in an ideal SOA platform.

This latest push by Red Hat in the SOA market is part of a plan to capture as much as 50% of the enterprise middleware market, though a specific timeline for achieving this milestone has not been announced.