We recently announced new alliances in the ObjectWeb world. JBoss is doing the same, and has just teamed up with IONA, and webMethods. IONA, the large EAI company, will have a version of their products which uses JBoss Server as the J2EE engine. This is interesting, since they have had their own J2EE certified server.

JBoss has gained a great partner to round out their legacy integration story. They will also have access to IONA's customer base.

webMethods also announced that they will be bundling JBoss with their server. They are going to enable J2EE components to run directly inside the webMethods engine (compared to calling out to the J2EE server as they do now). webMethods CTO said, "This unification will serve to boost overall performance of webMethods 6 while also allowing developers to write both integration code and application logic from within a single environment."

There are a couple of really interesting trends coming out of these announcements:

- We are seeing continued consilidation in the market in general, and with open source bundling in particular.
- We are seeing the EAI vs. Big J2EE vendor wars progress. J2EE vendors are adding integration technology, and EAI vendors are going the other way.

News from around the net

JBoss Allies With Iona
JBoss Adds Iona To Growing Partner List
Iona updates app server platform
JBoss Group and IONA Announce Strategic Alliance; JBoss Application Server Community to Benefit From IONA's Enterprise-Level Consultancy, Training and Support Expertise

According to Apple's web site:

"Mac OS X Server v10.3 now includes the popular JBoss application
 server, as well as Apache Tomcat"

 http://developer.apple.com/java/

 http://www.apple.com/server/macosx/web_technologies.html

Yeah, we talked about that in:

JBoss Server to be embedded in Mac OS X Panther (10.3)

It really is interesting to seeing more and more commercial companies leveraging open source.

Dion

Are companies leveraging it or just distributing it?

I think that some vendors are seeing that there is open source technology that is good enough that they can:

- Not spend significant dev effort on writing their own core framework (they still need to integrate, test, etc)
- Can build on top of these frameworks
- Can integrate with any tools that work with this framework. Now suddenly all of the code written for Open Source Project X, can work with their system

IONA has taken a certain path with their partnership. No?

Is Iona replacing their app server with JBoss? Then this is big news. I wonder if any other smaller J2EE vendors will follow suit?

The announcement that we made with Iona yesterday (http://www.jboss.org/modules/html/services/press/iona111003.pdf) is a broad alliance. As part of this, Iona is endorsing the JBoss open source application server. JBoss is also endorsing Iona as a provider of JBoss services, including enterprise level support. This support will be offered as bundled with the Iona Orbix and Artix product lines as well as stand alone.

My view is that Iona significantly strengthened their J2EE roadmap with yesterday's announcment. Iona will continue to support their own application server thru 2008 to assure the highest level of customer support in addition to the new support for JBoss. In addition Iona announced a new Orbix Connect product that connects all J2EE and CORBA environments thru JCA, with JBoss as the default application server. This will make it easy to connect the CORBA and J2EE worlds.

This is great news for users of JBoss since it provides even more enterprise-level support capability and a strong endorsement of JBoss open source.

Bob Bickel
JBoss
bob@jboss.org

Congrats. Good move. Good move for JBOSS and for OS. Good for all.