Customers happy with Red Hat/JBoss connection

Vendors sometimes say "synergy" before an acquisition. But a customer saying it afterward? Did one of these deals actually work?

By Jim Romeo, LinuxWorld.com, 03/28/07

 Start a discussion    Print article

 Comments (1)    Print article

In April of 2006, Red Hat acquired open-source J2EE application server vendor JBoss for $420 million. According to previous reports, Oracle was interested in buying JBoss earlier that year for more money, but Red Hat beat them to the punch. A year later, what does the new Red Hat landscape look like for Linux and JBoss customers?

Customers seem to like the acquisition, since many Red Hat customers were already JBoss users and can consolidate their vendor base with ease. Red Hat now offers a single subscription product, Red Hat Application Stack, that includes JBoss and Red Hat Enterprise Linux, along with the Apache Web server, the PHP and Perl languages, and the open-source databases MySQL and PostgreSQL.

“When we ventured on the path of building a Sales Workstyle Management solution a few years ago, we decided to build the solution using open-source technologies,” says Anupam Singh, CTO for Landslide.com, a provider of a sales force software solution in Pittsburgh. “We chose Red Hat over other Linux distributions for time to market and efficiency and also their close relationship with the hardware we are using. We chose JBoss as it also bundled other complementary technologies while keeping our architecture and solution vendor neutral."

Like Landslide, others had independently chosen JBoss before the acquisition. “The decision to use JBoss was made independently of the decision to use Red Hat Linux,” says Rob DiMarco, vice president of software for Health Market Science (HMS) a revenue enhancement and recovery services provider to government healthcare programs and others in the healthcare industry. The 7-year-old firm switched completely to Red Hat in 2004 for the stability and reliability of Red Hat’s Enterprise product line and the support from Oracle and other vendors for the platform.

As the acquired company integrates into Red Hat’s offering, customers are beginning to see the fruits of the deal. “Until JBoss was acquired, they [Red Hat] couldn’t quite give you end-to-end support. Now with their Linux support and this application server, they have a new profit center and a one-stop vendor for both explains John Engate, CTO for Rackspace, a leading managed hosting provider based in San Antonio, who uses both Red Hat Linux and JBoss . Rackspace, like many Red Hat customers, not only uses JBoss, but also services customers who use it.

Featured Whitepapers

The Trend from UNIX to Linux in SAP(r) Data Centers

LinuxCast Listen to the latest Linux news.

About Us | Contact Us | Advertising Info | Terms of Service/Privacy

Copyright, 2006-2007 Network World, Inc. All rights reserved.