Why RedHat buying JBoss is a good thing for BEA
Bill Roth's Blog |
April 10, 2006 1:54 PM
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Comments (10)
By now, most of you have probably heard that JBoss has been bought by RedHat. I have been following JBoss and their ups and downs for a while, including my BEA Workshop for JBoss post.
On balance, I think this is a good thing for BEA and for the industry, and it provides further validation of BEA’s blended strategy. Furthermore, It’s good news for the application server market more investment means more innovation across the board. In general, it means that one of our partners, RedHat(which produces an OS very popular with our customers), now has a low-end app server that we can work with. We have been able to deploy to JBoss for a while, and this just means that customers who "blend" open source and commercial containers will be well supported by RedHat.
It will be interesting to see how IBM and RHAT’s relationship changes now that they are more competitors than partners. Our approach is different: Blended is all about AND not OR. BEA is now the only supplier in the app server market who is OS, database, application and system integrator independent. And I think this is something that enterprise customers, looking to mitigate risk, will embrace. Who knows what this could portend for the future? BEA could even decide to support the blended approach with JBoss as a more reasonable IP model is sure to emerge. It will also be interesting to see how the integration of the two companies comes about, since there has been some tension in the past.
We will continue supporting deployment to JBoss for the foreseeable future. As JBoss improves so will our tooling for them. Best of luck to the merged entity.
Comments
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Bill....interesting post. Not sure what to make of the RedHat / JBoss acquistion other than the fact that Marc Fluery is now RedHat's problem... ;-)
Seriously, I think short-term your "keep your friends close, but your enemy's closer" strategy is a good one. Long-term I think this acquisition strikes at the heart of the app server "market" and pushes it further to the rank of a commodity. Just look at what Linux has done to the OS market. The App Server market is not long for this world....hence why you folks are making such a fevored move to SOA with AquaLogic.
As for being the only "supplier in the app server market who is OS, database, application and system integrator independent"....come on now! Sun, IBM, Oracle, Pramati, etc., etc. are all OS, Database, application, and SI independent whether or not you want to acknowledge it. A LARGE majority of BEA's installations are on Sun or Linux, with nearly ALL of them having an Oracle DB on the backend....this claim seems a bit childish and I would argue most customers don't give a rats behind.
We can both agree on one thing....it sure is going to be interesting to see how all this shakes out.
Posted by: Dr. BEA Good on April 10, 2006 at 6:42 PM
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We are indeed the only credible app server supplier in the market who does not have an agenda. Oracle's real agenda, for example, is to sell a database, no matter how much software they have to give away.
BTW, we're flattered that someone from Oracle spends so much time paying attention to our blogs. See the comment at the bottom of this blog where we figure out just where Dr. BEA Good comes from.
Posted by: wgroth2 on April 10, 2006 at 7:34 PM
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Bea's most important competitive asset is its NEUTRALITY (not linked to OS, DB, application or hardware platform). bea is the only "neutral" vendor out there with CRITICAL mass. it's a huge diffrentiation...yet so few realise this.
Posted by: agnesmuylle on April 11, 2006 at 6:37 AM
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agnesmuylle,
Thank you for your comments. Internally, this is something that we firmly believe is important. Thank you for calling it out.
Posted by: wgroth2 on April 11, 2006 at 8:20 AM
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I'll let you guys believe what you like. But, as I said before I am not an Oracle employee inspite of what Sherlock "Eric Stahl" Holmes would have you believe. I am an independent contractor...let's leave it at that.
Because of my position, I happen to know BEA and the middleware space very well. I have also said many times, BEA has very good products, and that dev2dev is a great resource. Have Sherlock Holmes read my past posts since he's so good at research and jumping to assumptions. I just can't stand when you folks turn a "developers resource" into a marketing tool. It's bunk (I would have preferred to use a stronger word)!!!
BEA's "neutrality"...there's an oxymoron if I ever heard one! As for me spending time paying attention to your blogs...talk about the POT calling the Kettle black! You guys spend SO much time Oracle bashing its scary. Fact of the matter is...both organizations are more ALIKE and INTERDEPENDENT upon one another than either would ever care to admit. My friends here on "the dark side" don't like when I say it, and I would suspect you won't either.
Posted by: Dr. BEA Good on April 11, 2006 at 4:40 PM
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Oracle strategical focus is on database selling, not middelware! thats why is not independant! not clear?
Posted by: aleorat on April 12, 2006 at 11:45 PM
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Hey look....George W. Bush is a blogger! Sorry, just couldn't pass that one up.
Oracle's strategic focus is on Applications and SOA, or have you been hanging out with Rip Van Winkle? Fusion Applications and Fusion Middleware focus of a good majority of their efforts. In that sense, BEA and Oracle are very much alike. Moving into new product areas because their core software (Oracle DB and WebLogic Server) are moving into the maturity phase of the product life cycle. Cheaper competitors driving prices down by increasing the competitive alternatives. If you haven't checked...Fusion Apps will run with MSFT, BEA, IBM, JBoss etc. Fusion Middleware RUNS with Oracle's App Server, BEA's, IBM's, and JBoss's TODAY....that's true independence. By BEA's narrow measure of independence (excluding other competitors) sure they are the "only" independent vendor out there.
Again....look at the two companies; Oracle uses JRockit, Tux (underneath PSFT), and it supports WLS for Apps and Fusion Middleware. Oracle is also the database that 90% of ALL BEA installs for WebLogic use. As for BEA, their IT Department uses Oracle DB, PSFT, and Siebel. They drive their entire business off those two applications. Every sales rep has an instance of Oracle DB running on their laptops to forecast into Siebel....and so on.
Both companies should stop spending so much time worrying about the other one and worry about the real threats....IBM and Open Source.
Posted by: Dr. BEA Good on April 13, 2006 at 10:04 AM
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Dr. Bea,
Orcl wants customers to buy an integrated ORCL stack (apps, DB, BI..) and replace their existing systems with ORCL stuff.
Bea enables customers to leverage whatever asset(legacy, mainframe, apps from diffrent vendors, DBs from diffrent vendors...).
Their is a huge fundamental difference between those two messages. i'm sorry if you don't see this diffrence.
Posted by: agnesmuylle on April 13, 2006 at 10:26 AM
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Sure, and BEA wants its customers to buy an end to end integrated WebLogic or AquaLogic stack. What's your point Agnes? There is no "fundamental" difference between the two companys. Oracle acts no differently than BEA....they'll sell you the whole enchilada if you want it, but there are plenty of E-Business Suite and PeopleSoft customers who use BEA....and I hate to tell you they ain't all running Oracle DB. Oracle announced a short time back that they have every intention of supporting IBM and MSFT with the next major release of their Apps. To do otherwise would be suicide. Oracle's middleware stack is pure J2EE and is not dependent on Oracle DB or Oracle's App Server for that matter. Oracle's middleware will run on BEA, WebSphere, and JBoss as well. Not even BEA can claim that!
I hate to tell you, but there's no magic here. You and our friends at BEA would like to convince yourselves that Oracle and IBM do not allow customers "choice" and that somehow BEA is the only company that can carry the mantle of independence. You need to check your facts and stop the marketing pitch.
Posted by: Dr. BEA Good on April 15, 2006 at 9:25 AM
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IBM's Rational Application Developer (RAD) currently does not support MySQL out of the box... IBM is very much focussed on integrating their line of products (WebSphere, WebSphere Community Server, DB2, Tivoli, Lotus, Workplace, etc.), at least for the time being they are busy with that. I guess IBM is very powerful, but also the tools have many flaws currently... I get the feeling that they are dealing with a lot of problems because they are so large, and they are facing problems getting things done properly. I think IBM has good assets, but they also must learn to dance again... (and again...)
Posted by: MarkyGoldstein on April 17, 2006 at 5:36 AM
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