JBoss Open Choice
Jun 4th, 2009 by sharps
Earlier this week we announced a couple of things. First, a change in our platform strategy, second some new products to implement that strategy. We felt we had to give that strategy a name and “Open Choice”, while unoriginal, best illustrated what we’re doing. And what we’re doing is expanding our support to include Open Source technologies beyond what we’ve typically supported and beyond the JBoss constellation.
This is a reaction to a) customer demand; and b) the realization that not all the cool stuff is created by JBoss. What we’re also doing is reacting to market demand. Java EE, while hugely successful is not the only game in town any more.
We want to ensure that our customers get to choose whatever frameworks, languages, development models they want without causing major disruption for the operations people who have to manage the applications for the other 90% of the application lifecyle (ie. outside development). We also want to remove the risk of deploying new developer oriented tech. by providing a stable, consistent operational footprint (JBoss) to run the resulting apps.
Note – I normally don’t use Job Trends data in isolation to make serious decisions, but it’s convenient and lazy way to find what keywords are trending.
So yes, this is a reactive move; we’re reacting to customer demand and market pressure – we’re really not reacting to anything that Spring Source is doing. I’ll post another blog explaining what we’re including in our Web Framework Kit and why; but Spring Framework is included for much the same reason as struts – they’re mature technologies and both are very widely deployed :
It’s no secret that a big chunk of our business comes from our much larger but less nimble competitors and we have to ensure that migration is a simple and low risk proposition.
As the chart shows (if you have any faith in the data) – Spring Framework usage is fairly evenly distributed across the Java container landscape. By making JBoss a better place to run Spring (among other things) – I believe that we can change this landscape dramatically.
This really isn’t about Spring Source – in fact we don’t even compete with Spring Source. Our sights are set much higher.
Interesting to see the charts as a balance to Rod’s recent blog post.
I’m curious what the hiring figures would look like for the SpringSource and RedHat companies themselves?
[...] Red Hat’s Open Choice initiative is defensive response to SpringSource, a suggestion that was denied by Rich Sharples. Freeloaders, leeches and hermits I already provided my views earlier this week [...]
[...] Margaritas start flowing. At Java One this year we announced an initiative called Open Choice which I blogged about previously. Fundamentally Open Choice is about broadening our footprint and giving customers what they want [...]