DataDirect announced a new marketing and technology agreement with JBoss this week, and JDJ was able to reach DataDirect's VP of Production Operations, John Goodson, to answer some questions related to the deal:


John Goodson


JDJ: What sort of enterprise-class customers do you have in mind with this partnership with JBoss? Are there key vertical markets you're addressing and/or specific types of applications?

John Goodson: Basically, any organization that is building or deploying a mission-critical application needs the best possible data connectivity solution. And more and more, we are starting to see these critical systems built on mixed source technologies – like JBoss on Linux with an Oracle database. Just like in purely commercial stacks, reliable, fast data connectivity is extremely important. These trend transcends any particular vertical industry – but we are seeing a lot of interest in mixed source in financial services and retail at the moment.

We’re also seeing XML-savvy organizations that use web services to process data leverage our drivers to interact with data stored in a relational database. Organizations that are starting to use Object / Relational mapping solutions like Hibernate, tend to rely on the DataDirect JDBC driver for fast, reliable data access.

JDJ: What sort of opportunities do you see for database-independent development? Is this something that you see as a need from your existing customers?

JG: Customers turn to us in two scenarios – when they need the fastest, most reliable connectivity to a single database and when they need our comprehensive coverage across databases and database versions. The latter is where database independence comes in – and this tends to be with our independent software vendor customers and with large, heterogeneous IT departments within major corporations.

JDJ: What percentage of business that will evolve from this agreement will be devoted to new application development, as compared to improving/augmenting existing applications?

JG: Although a significant number of our customers are building new applications, a lot of organizations turn to us since their existing applications are experiencing reliability, performance or scalability problems. Add to this the number of companies who are now leveraging mixed source, and this represents a great opportunity for us.

And mixed source is more than just our JDBC products with app servers like JBoss. We’re also seeing significant interest in our ODBC product for use with the Linux operating systems and with scripting languages like PHP and Perl.