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SOA: Open Source SOA Infrastructure
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Despite early resistence, Open Source is spreading quickly throughout the enterprise. Iona’s recent acquistion of LogicBlaze is further proof of the trend. |
In mid-2005 Dublin, Ireland-based Iona Technologies initiated the Open Source Java-based Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) project called Celtix. During the 90’s Iona had been a leader in CORBA technology, but CORBA has long since lost mindshare among developers. Iona has now moved on to the next generation messaging technology. They’ve embraced the ESB, software middleware based on a distributed architecture that enables different applications and processes to communicate.
An ESB can help to simplify building and integrating technical and business components that can be flexibly reused. The ESB is at the heart of data communication within an SOA environment.
Iona’s strategy was to use Open Source to help accelerate the adoption and development of ESB technology. Their selection of using Java as the implementation language allows them to run on nearly any platform.
A year ago Iona’s Celtix project advanced to a 1.0 release of the product by hitting’Milestone 5′, a point where Iona felt that Celtix compared well to commercial ESB products in features and robustness.
In December 2006 Iona introduced Celtix Enterprise, a collection of SOA-oriented middleware. The Enterprise product uses software from the Apache Open Source CXF project, a framework for allowing interoperable Web Services across a variety of technologies, like JAX-WS, POJO, WS-RM and JavaScript.
With Iona’s purchase of LogicBlaze earlier this month, Iona gains additional SOA expertise in the areas of messaging, integration and ESB. Two of LogicBlaze’s products were ActiveMQ and ServiceMix, both of which are hosted on Apache. LogicBlaze also brings 25 active customers to the table that include leaders in financial services, government and telecommunications.
Iona’s and LogicBlaze’s service subscriptions, training and consulting revenue models are similar, so the merger is expected to be fairly smooth. Consolidation of these Open Source products only puts further pressure on commercial software vendors.
Iona is not the only well-accepted player in Open Source SOA/ESBs. The Open Source Mule proejct has also been very successful. Red Hat’s JBoss Enterprise Service Bus is yet another Open Source contender.
