Red Hat has rolled out its middleware strategy, including an announcement to buy MetMatrix and the introduction of new JBoss offerings. “With many enterprises spending as much as 70% of their IT budget on maintaining stove-piped legacy applications while a backlog of projects continues piling up, it's clear that proprietary application infrastructure vendors have failed to deliver relief for the CIO,” said Tim Yeaton, Senior Vice President of Enterprise Solutions, Red Hat. “Until now, enterprises have had to choose from solutions with high acquisition, high integration, and high lock-in costs. By applying the attributes that made Red Hat Enterprise Linux the number one Unix migration platform to our JBoss Enterprise Middleware, Red Hat is providing customers a migration path to long-term value, choice, and control of their IT infrastructure.”

Siloed legacy applications hardwired to data sources have created inflexible application infrastructures that prohibit shared corporate IT assets, data reuse, interoperability, and business agility. JBoss Enterprise Middleware offers an open, low-cost, high-value migration foundation for customers to modernize these legacy application infrastructures to service-oriented architectures (SOA). Today's new developer and enterprise support subscriptions dramatically simplify the use of JBoss Enterprise Middleware for SOA across the application life cycle, the company says.

To accelerate this next migration and make it easier for customers to build on and deploy JBoss Enterprise Middleware, Red Hat is moving away from the current a la carte approach where customers mix and match different components to suit their IT projects to a set of integrated, tested, and certified JBoss Enterprise Platform distributions for the most common use cases. These new distributions come as a single download and are supported by a fully inclusive subscription with automated update and patch stream and multi-year service level agreements (SLAs).

With the creation of JBoss Enterprise Platform distributions, Red Hat says it is freeing up the JBoss.org community from the constraints of the productization process so it can focus on what it does best: innovate. The newly redesigned and rebranded JBoss.org site debuted today with new tools and developer-focused content to enhance the participant experience. JBoss.org remains the the R&D hotbed for JBoss Enterprise Platforms, but from today onwards, its 30-plus projects will have more latitude to deliver bleeding edge technologies faster to users. Once these releases are enterprise-ready, they will be integrated into JBoss Enterprise Platform distributions. Project releases remain freely available for download under an LGPL, GPL, or Apache open source license. Ad-hoc support for JBoss.org releases will be provided through the community.