Red Hat's JBoss road less traveled
Red Hat has announced its 2009 Innovation Awards, with some impressive finalists making the list. From Whole Foods to Harvard Business School Publishing, major organizations are doing impressive things with Red Hat technology. Interestingly, however, the real "innovation" revealed by these awards is just how much more money Red Hat makes in its JBoss deals than in its Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) deals.
I reported earlier this year that Red Hat's JBoss business is growing at twice the rate of its RHEL business. This isn't surprising: JBoss is still relatively small change compared to RHEL, growing from a smaller base.
But that's not the whole story. JBoss drives $10 in services revenue for every $1 in subscription revenue, which makes JBoss much more interesting to Red Hat's channel partners than RHEL. JBoss and the solutions that run on it are also much more interesting to CIOs, who tactically choose RHEL to save money but strategically choose JBoss to help make money.
RHEL is effectively just a commodity business, which means the best way to juice the business is to grow the volume of transactions through the channel, because it's difficult to grow the size of those transactions.
RHEL is all about "selling boxes" (i.e., servers), in other words. It's tactical, not deeply strategic.
If you look at Red Hat's Innovation Awards finalists, the RHEL innovation leaders are those that are saving money on the operating system but still spending plenty on applications like SAP, because applications drive their business value. At Whole Foods Markets, for example, "innovation" means "use of Red Hat Satellite to manage its Red Hat Enterprise Linux systems that resulted in reduced costs, reallocated resources and the ability of the Whole Foods IT department to focus on strategic business initiatives."
Moving to RHEL, in short, was tactical: it allowed Whole Foods to innovate ("focus on strategic business initiatives") elsewhere. RHEL wasn't the innovation. It enabled the innovation.
JBoss is different. JBoss enables the Red Hat sales team to focus on the strategic initiatives within enterprises, because JBoss gets Red Hat closer to the applications that power these companies. An operating system lays the foundation for innovation. An application server and, critically, the applications that run on it, serves up the innovation itself, and makes Red Hat much more interesting to CIOs.
Red Hat has a decision to make moving forward. It can move up the software stack and sell JBoss-based solutions that get it a seat at the CIO's table with Oracle, Microsoft, IBM, SAP, and others. Or it can continue its tactical push by focusing on increased volume of RHEL-based servers into the market.
There is plenty of value (and money) in either the tactical (RHEL) or strategic (JBoss) approach, but Red Hat becomes a truly disruptive, game-changing company through enhanced focus on middleware and applications. As a (mostly) Linux vendor, Red Hat can make plenty of money but will never make waves.
Today, Red Hat is a big (but little) company. Big in its sales as it approaches $1 billion in revenues. But little in its ambition to disrupt the industry through open source by giving CIOs a true choice in the area that matters most to their businesses: applications.
Follow me on Twitter @mjasay.
Matt Asay brings a decade of in-the-trenches open-source business and legal experience to The Open Road, with an emphasis on emerging open-source business strategies and opportunities. Matt is vice president of business development at Alfresco, a company that develops open-source software for content management. He is a member of the CNET Blog Network and is not an employee of CNET. Disclosure. You can follow Matt on Twitter @mjasay. 
Just two weeks ago you were salivating that Spring was 'replacing' JBoss and 'disrupting' the market. Now suddenly JBoss is the 'strategic' vision? Didn't you write that the 'Java community' was dumping app servers like JBoss in favor of 'light-weight containers' like Tc Server?
Please, your readers aren't idiots.
Give me a freaking break. Has this clown ever developed anything beyond a Hello World program?
Spring is total crap when compared to vanilla J2EE. JBoss or any other J2EE server provides more functionality and stability than Spring. Any experienced J2EE developer knows this.
Spring is ok for somethings, and contradictory, it works best when the developer uses it inside of a J2EE server.
Where does C/Net find these clowns? At the Ringling Brothers Clown College?
I'm not going to argue that Spring is crappy, but I can't say JBoss is a great alternative. Right now at work I'm working on converting all our apps from JBoss 4.2.3 to 5., and it's giving me the worst headache I've had in my life. Why can't it be backwards compatible? Why does 5.1 throw deployment errors when 4.2.3 runs the app perfectly? Why, after a total rewrite, does JMS still suck in JBoss 5? And best of all, why, after buying "JBoss in Action," do I still have to Google everything that goes wrong with the AS. I think the simple answer is, "It's free, stop complaining." And so, JBoss continues to be the most widely used, and the most mediocre, Java EE server out there.
The path to insecure systems start with backwards compatibility.
One of these days CNet will get serious about Opensource/Linux and get a person(s) in here that want to educate the reader/fan base that CNet has. Until someone with a tie gets wise to this poser looks like we are just stuck with slinging razors over his posts and smashing our heads on our desks.
I don't agree that RHEL is a commodity bussiness. If you see RHEL management, virtualization and high availability roadmap to confirm that is strategic.... just think about in prospects from SAP, DBs installed customers (world wide)... that's not "selling boxes" it's selling value.
http://www.redhat.com/virtualization-strategy/
Kind regards,
Hernan.
- by pentest August 11, 2009 5:09 PM PDT
- Nothing wrong with this. An OS should sit in the background, transparent. The software that makes money for RH clients is JBoss. It just need a solid OS to run on top of.
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