At JBoss World 2008, JBoss has announced its "Enterprise Acceleration" initiative. The initiative, says JBoss VP of middleware Craig Muzilla, is "An umbrella initiative that will consist of products, programs and services to speed the adoption of JBoss middleware in the enterprise."
While sounding similar at first blush to Sun's Java Enterprise System (JES) offering, delivered in 2005, Enterprise Acceleration has one key differentiator: JBoss will be creating several Enterprise Acceleration Centers, offered both as brick and mortar facilities and online. These centers will offer JBoss enterprise users individual "labs" covering these four key areas of typical enterprise deployments:
- Migration: For the parts of your solution that you are replacing with JBoss software, the migration lab will make your migration as smooth as possible.
- Interoperability: For the parts of your solution that you are not replacing with JBoss, or for which JBoss has no offering, the interop lab will help you get all that stuff working with your JBoss enterprisemongery.
- Performance tuning: Make your solution run as fast as possible.
- Certification: LiveCert. Mr. Muzilla said that they "...will allow you to use this laboratory to test your JBoss products to ensure they are operating the way they should operate." Sounds like acceptance.
The goal of the labs is to give you the tools, resources, and best practices to deploy JBoss with confidence.
The other two pillars of the initiative are essentially a consolidation of their existing "Comprehensive" Middleware Portfolio, Architecture, and Enterprise Products, with some added guarantees of works-well-together-ness that also was a selling point of JES.
Their stated goal with the Enterprise Acceleration initiative is, "by 2015, when you look into the [middleware] marketplace, at the infrastructure that's being deployed, our goal is to have 50% of the middleware marketplace, in deployment."
Mr. Muzilla further stated that he wants to "leverage the success that we've had throughout the years, with developers, and now make [JBoss software] a de facto standard within corporate IT." When asked about how that relates to JBoss's future support of the Java Community Process (JCP) standards body, Mr. Muzilla deferred to Sacha Labourey, VP of Engineering for Middleware at JBoss. "We play an important role as part of the JCP. We're in the Executive Committee, and we're leading some specs, such as WebBeans." Mr. Labourey went on, "The JCP is not the
only star in the sky. We intend to look at everything out there and be very opportunistic and to take whatever the customers want to take. But we're also gonna drive things and makes sure that if we think there is a good standard out there, we use it for our platforms."
With the creation of the Enterprise Acceleration initiative, JBoss and RedHat are demonstrating a solid understanding of the IT troops in the field and what they need to deliver value to their organizations. It remains to be seen if this iniative will succeed in securing JBoss's place in that value chain.
[Editor's note: this was written by Mr. Burns reporting from the conference, and has been posted with only a few changes. Assume any errors are on the part of the TSS editorial staff rather than Ed.]
