RedHat is the world largest Enterprise Open Source company. Since their acquisition of JBoss, speculation has been rampant about their next acquisition and their strategy in the ESB market. Of note was the JBoss acquisition of Arjuna Transaction Service Suite (ArjunaTS) previously. Now the speculation has been put to rest.
Along with the Arjuna technology came Mark Little, who is JBoss Director of Standards and Development Manager for the Transactions and ESB products. Since attaining this role, Mark has released the alpha version of JBossESB. Mark announces the acquisition of Rosetta ESB on his blog.
This product claims the following features:
- MQ support including MQSeries and JBossMQ
- Transformation engine
- Service registry
- Persisted event repository
- Base transport mechanism
- Pluggable architecture
- Notification service
The Rosetta ESB technology was developed at Aviva Canada, Canada's second largest Insurance company. This product is a 'homebrew" ESB deployed on top of a cluster of JBoss Application Servers (running on RedHat by the way) by software developers at Aviva.
JBoss intends to implement their proposed ESB architecture using the Rosetta ESB technology as a base. They plan to have a beta version available in the next few months and a GA ready by the end of 2006.
With this RedHat is entering a market not only crowded with ESB vendors, but one where there are several other open source ESB options. In fact, some of these open source options have professional support contract options, notably the Mule project supported by SymphonySoft, the ServiceMix ESB supported by LogicBlaze, the Celtix project supported by IONA and the Synapse project supported by WSO2.