JBoss grows market share and share of projects on Linux

Red Hat's acquisition of JBoss looks like a smooth move for customers, as JBoss market share grows and the company sees more JBoss deployments move to Linux.

By Richard Hillesley, LinuxWorld.com, 11/28/06

The JBoss World expo and conference in Berlin last week was something of a celebration of the continued growth of open source in EMEA over the last 12 months.

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JBoss and Red Hat see themselves as 'pure open source' providers with genuine roots in the communities from which they have sprung. The open source model has worked for Red Hat and JBoss because of the understanding they have nurtured within these communities, which is something they were happy to emphasize and contrast with their competitors at every opportunity - and it was hard at times not to trip over the small groups of JBoss developers who gathered in corners to talk over coding issues.

Despite, or maybe because of, the recent announcements by Oracle, Novell and Microsoft, Red Hat and JBoss were buoyant in their predictions for the future. JBoss has experienced 240% growth in its partner ecosystem during the last year, and a phenomenal 42% increase in revenue growth across the EMEA region. They have seen particular success in those vertical sectors which, for their different reasons, have proved to be the early adopters of open source technologies, such as the financial and telecoms sectors, which were prominent among the case studies in the conference.

The conference also featured stands hosted by JBoss partners, including HP, Unisys, CapGemini, Atos, Inubit and See Why; a Red Hat Forum; a service-oriented architecture (SOA) track that included real-world case studies; an executive series focusing on the business of open source; and a laptop workshop series designed to give developers hands-on experience with JBoss Seam, ESB and Rules. This show was evidence of the rapidly expanding enterprise open source user community, which seems to be immune to the recent threats to Red Hat's business model from Oracle and Microsoft, and is eager to explore the new found benefits of free software.

As a middleware platform, JBoss is not specific to any vertical sector of industry. Nonetheless, JBoss has typically found particular success among "the fast moving financial institutions," according to Michel Goossens, the vice president of EMEA sales and marketing for JBoss, "and among the telcos, which have a need to develop new applications every day. We play well with the Ericcsons, the Nokias and Siemens of the world," which are organizations that need to differentiate their products on an ongoing basis by creating in-house applications for a specialized market. "They have to move quickly," and the flexibility of JBoss, and the fact that the software is available with no-cost licenses, is "irresistible to such enterprises," he said.