RedHat completes JBoss Acquisition

Posted by Floyd Marinescu on Jun 05, 2006

Sections

Operations & Infrastructure,

Enterprise Architecture,

Development,

Architecture & Design

Topics

Java ,

Business ,

Application Servers ,

Open Source

Tags

JBoss ,

RedHat

RedHat today announced the completion of the acquisition of JBoss; RedHat's goal with this acquisition is "to create a complete, end-to-end open source solution across the IT life cycle, from application development to testing and certification to production deployment."  JBoss will become a distint division within RedHat, led by original JBoss founder Marc Fleury who is now Senior Vice President and General Manager of the JBoss division.  RedHat has announced that JBoss' open source projects, community and branding will be maintained and invested in going forward, although the new integrated company will share a common open source support model.

Red Hat will focus initially on integrating company efforts such as developer outreach, certification, management, and SOA strategy, and then focus on ensuring that JBoss software and RedHat software like Red Hat Directory Server will work well together.  RedHat's own application server, which was based on JOnAS from the ObjectWeb Consortium will be dropped.

JBoss, which raised $10 million in venture capital in 2004 was purchased for $350 million. That figure could rise to $425 million, if JBoss meets certain financial targets. JBoss, company investors predict, will generate $60 million this year in revenue.

According to Marc Fleury:

Joining forces with Red Hat makes absolute sense for JBoss employees, customers, partners and the community as a whole. We share a common passion for innovation, technology and open source. Red Hat will give JBoss a platform to grow, so we can both continue to deliver exceptional open source products, services and customer value.  am personally very excited to help further drive the adoption of our market-leading solutions.

JBoss and RedHat have been talking a lot about commoditizing the SOA space (see recent Fleury interview summary on  InfoQ), and in particular, JBoss ESB.  As re reported recently, JBoss ESB is currently in very early stages, and faces competition fom already established open source projects such as Mule and ServiceMix, as well as from existing mature offerings from BEA, IBM, Oracle, Sonic, and others. Mark Little who was a core architect of the Arjuna transactions middleware JBoss acquired last year, is leading the project and they are currently still determining the requirements and basic architecture, with a lot of interesting discussions on the JBoss ESB mailing list.

The acquisition closing announcement was made this morning without warning. InfoQ will continue to update this news item as more information becomes available.

• Older >