Analysts like me miss the bombastic claims of JBoss founder Marc Fleury. At the JBoss Virtual Conference held February 11, Craig Muzilla, now head of the JBoss division of Red Hat (RHAT) and formerly with MetaMatrix (acquired by JBoss in 2007), had the same sort of statistics to work with as Fleury used to have. But he lacked the swagger in laying them out.
Consistent with Red Hat’s goal that it will have 50% of the enterprise information technology (IT) work running its Linux and middleware products by 2015, Muzilla promised savings over comparable IBM (IBM) and Oracle/BEA products of 50-80%s. I’m sure that that statistic is technically correct in terms of comparing some price lists. But IT users realize that the JBoss products are not yet truly comparable with Oracle (ORCL) and IBM up and down the middleware stack.
But Red Hat is working hard to get there.
When asked about market share, Muzilla was intellectually honest and careful to answer instead about market usage (see the difference here). He claimed usage of JBoss software of some type of 30-40% in midsize and large enterprises. Parse that sentence carefully: That’s some type of JBoss product and some type of usage, mostly in developer try-it-you’ll-like it or on on a ad-hoc basis. Still Fleury would have taken that question, doubled the usage rate, and ran with it for 15 minutes.
When served up a softball on the difference between open source and closed source, Muzilla carefully explained the Lesser Gnu General Public License (LGPL) and Red Hat JBoss’ worldwide community structure with no comparison or criticism of other products. Marc would still be answering the question when they turned off the microphones… with a lot of red meat for us analysts and journalists.
Muzilla spoke about how the open source model keeps R&D costs down because project leads are both in and outside the Red Hat organization and even some JBoss customers contribute back. Of course IBM, which probably overtook Red Hat in terms of open-source-based software shipments in 2008, and others have figured this model out as well. But they tend to apply the formula further down the stack to low margin products that IBM and other bigger companies think of as commodities.
In terms of internal Red Hat metrics, Craig Muzilla noted that JBoss is growing twice as fast as Red Hat’s infrastructure products and JBoss has five times more people in both community and partners ecosystem than at the time of the acquisition.
A key thing looking forward Muzilla said is that JBoss is being revised so that the runtime environment is not dictated. He is expanding frameworks supported from just JEE to Spring, Adobe (ADBE) Flex and Google (GOOG), and so forth.
And he claims now is the “inflexion point where companies are standardizing on open source middleware.” I believe that’s true. Of course it’s not necessarily just JBoss open source middleware but JBoss has a good head start on IBM Gluecode and others thanks to Fleury.
(Aside: The Red Hat JBoss Virtual Enterprise was a good take and I believe the recorded sessions are available for a few months on the Red Hat web site.)
-- Dennis Byron
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