Does it Really Stack Up?

Last week Red Hat announced plans to acquire open-source software maker JBoss for $350 million in cash and stock.  This is yet another data point showing the intense industry-wide effort now underway by software vendors to be able to claim single-vendor end-to-end software solutions for the enterprise, software ranging from the OS to high-level applications.  These end-to-end bundles of software components are often called “stacks”.   This particular announcement is interesting because it signals an important step towards creating an open-source stack.

JBoss had been seen by many as a very attractive takeover candidate.  Months before the announcement of the acquisition there was talk of potential match-ups with Oracle, Novell and Red Hat, and just days before the announcement, there were still rumors of Oracle discussing a $500 million buyout of JBoss, a deal that seems to have fallen apart because of a clash of corporate cultures. 

JBoss is known for its open-source Java-based JBoss application server but JBoss products include other well-regarded middleware offerings like a jBPM workflow engine, and a rules engine.  The middleware building blocks in JBoss’ product line are key components needed to power the services of an SOA architecture. 

JBoss offers Red Hat a well-recognized brand and a chance to expand its stack beyond just the Operating System.  Red Hat is currently the market leader for offering support and services around Linux.  Novell SUSE Linux is Red Hat’s major competitor in that market.

Red Hat has been trying to put together the foundations of a stack for some time, but they haven’t been successful on their own.  They do offer a Java-based application server that is based on the open-source JOnAS application server developed by the European ObjectWeb consortium.  They also have an LDAP-based directory server.  Neither of these products have gained significant traction, but with the addition of JBoss middleware, Red Hat has the potential to become a powerhouse player in the open-source space.

Compared to Red Hat, prior to this announcement, Novell has been more successful in their efforts to build a stack, and they already claim to have done so.  Interestingly, one component of the Novell stack is JBoss.  Just how the merger between JBoss and Red Hat will affect Novell’s strategy is not entirely clear. 

Microsoft has long offered a unified one-vendor stack strategy.  Microsoft has approached the market from the bottom-up, tending to be more popular with departmental solutions rather than across the enterprise.  Java-based solutions, on the other hand, have tended to dominate the enterprise, but those solutions have typically been multi-vendor — different vendors for OS, DB, middleware, and application.

Java-world players, both open-source and commercial, have been trying to match the one-stop vendor strategy.  Oracle has aggressively signaled that this is their plan.  IBM, Novell, and now Red Hat are on the same course.

There’s much to be said about the simplicity of a Microsoft-style solution that’s based on software from a single vendor.  “Stack certification” from a single vendor provides reassurance that all components of a solution have been designed to work well together.  But it can also create an enterprise-wide dependency with a single vendor.

It’s interesting to note that a major reason why JBoss was an attractive acquisition candidate was for the middleware capabilities that JBoss brings to the area of SOA enablement.  Red Hat is adding another tier to their stack.  But SOA isn’t really about the stack.

The beauty of SOA is that it creates an infrastructure that allows mix-and-match interconnectivity between data services.  In an SOA implementation the origin of the individual components is not as important as it may have been in pre-SOA implementations.

But really how important is a stack?  At Formtek we’ve found that the use of Java has provided us great flexibility.  We’re not tied into supporting a single OS.  Our ECM solutions are currently Oracle-based.  Formtek is a long-time Oracle partner, but our JDBC implementation provide us the flexibility to easily migrate to a different database, should we decide to.  And our Web Services allow us to operate and co-exist with applications and services in both .Net and Java dominated worlds.

Technologies like SOA, Web Services and Java weaken the relevancy of single-source stacks and provide more options and flexibility to the customer.