Red Hat CEO Matt Szulik Explains the JBoss Deal

Anonymous Coward writes "eWeek has an interview with Red Hat CEO Matt Szulik about the JBoss acquisition, where he says he approached Marc Fleury about the deal, never discussed the Oracle negotiations with him, and positions Red Hat as the next generation enterprise technology company." From the article: "It certainly broadens our product portfolio into an adjacent market, the middleware market. Over the last 18 months we heard growing requests from government and commercial accounts that had JBoss and were using Tomcat and Hibernate and wanted Red Hat to take a more direct position in that market. They also wanted the service competencies that we can deliver globally."

Comments

Bring everything under one roof

[BadAnalogyGuy]

Is it even possible to have a monopoly in the OSS market?

Re:Bring everything under one roof

[smithberry]

Well, monopoloy can be defined as

a persistent market situation where there is only one provider of a kind of product

so in theory if there was an OSS project which was just sooo much better than anyone else that no-one bothered to compete it would be a monopoly.

Re:Bring everything under one roof

[vhogemann]

If you want to pay for it, yes.

Right now I'm having a major trouble trying to migrate a mail server from RedHat7.x to Debian Sarge because the mailboxes are stored at Symetrics EMC Storage unit, and they offer support to RedHat and Suse. We tried to get an answer from the vendor, to see if they could support Debian also, but in the end it took soooooooo long that the old server went down, and in order to keep the mail service up we instaled Debian anyways, and used an open-source module for the fibre-channel card.

Also, if you want to use Oracle on Linux, and keep their full support, you must use RedHat or Suse. You can run Oracle with Debian or Gentoo, but if you do that Oracle won't give you support...

So, the bottom line is: if you want to buy, only RedHat and Novell are selling. But if you want everything for free, you can get from anyone.

The Future of Software is Consulting, not Licenses

[LotTS]

This just further confirms the trend with software companies. Oracle has the 10g Application Server (which was once the Orion server slapped with the Oracle label). With JBoss, Oracle tried to get a completely new J2EE container under their umbrella. Why?

They were trying to "buy" JBoss customers, and the federal government is one of the biggest users of Open Source products such as JBoss. At least with the government, I see the amount of money spent on IT consultants compared to actual software licenses. Software was just an excuse to get Oracle consultants in the door.

Red Hat significantly upped their capabilities as a consulting company - might be a good idea to buy Red Hat stock.

Competition matters more than independence

[cryfreedomlove]

For me, it does not matter that JBoss is no longer 'independent'. What matters most is that there remain several viable competing options for J2EE containers. As consumers of J2EE we are best served in a world that still contains JBOSS, Geronimo, Weblogic, Websphere, OAS, etc. This is why I am glad Oracle did not buy JBoss. They already have their weakly supported OAS. I really think Oracle bought OAS so their sales reps could say 'Oracle does Java too' even though nobody really uses OAS. If they had bought JBoss the same thing would have happened to it over time. It would rot on the vine and we'd lose one more good option.

All I have to say is

[fury88]

Ok.. this is me jumping off the JBOSS bandwagon... GERONIMOOOOOOOO!!!!!

Re:The Future of Software is Consulting, not Licen

[molarmass192]

The Future of Software is Consulting, not Licenses

I mostly agree, the is a problem for established companies in that margins on licenses are near 100%, where as margins on consulting are closer to 30%. Moreover, there's far more fixed overhead associated with increasing consulting revenue than with increasing software revenue. The OSS model chips away at the foundation of software revenue while freeing dollars for consulting revenue. It's good because it means more employment for software techs. However, I think the future is going to be broader than just consulting. There are going to be openings in customization and implementation that weren't fully possible in the world of closed software.

Hibernate

[hypersql]

Oracle whould just have tried to convert JBoss customers to Oracle. Red Hat will probably let JBoss do what they want, and that's good (not that Linux would be bad).

The most imporant asset of JBoss is probably Hibernate, and I think Red Hat knows that even better than Marc Fleury. Java/Tomcat/Stuts(JSF)/Hibernate is a good and proven plattform, and is here to stay. I think app servers will play a less important role in the next years.

---
http://www.h2database.com/

Re:The Future of Software is Consulting, not Licen

[L the Cat]

There is a strong argument that software has always been a service. It is seldomly resold, requires consistent maintenance, etc. The old model of charging a fixed fee up front for a license was just the result of cultural circumstance. Now companies are moving toward subscription-based licensing and services models, which might very well be more appropriate.

Re:Red Hat's future bankruptcy

[vhogemann]

Are you kidding?

Did you ever saw an Java application running at the server-side? Tomcat/Struts/JSP is blazing fast, way faster than PHP for an example.

The real bottleneck for most web applications is the database access. And thanks to Hibernate, Java kicks the collective ass of every other web enabled language out there.

Re:Red Hat's future bankruptcy

[johnjaydk]

And thanks to Hibernate, Java kicks the collective ass of every other web enabled language out there.

And JBoss (the company) just happens to be deeply involved with Hibernate. Plus the hibernate model is pretty close to the new entity-bean model in EJB 3. Smart buy if you ask me ...