With Dell move, Red Hat remembers JBoss
It's nice to see Red Hat investing in JBoss. It's good for the company and, I believe, good for JBoss.
In the first formal offering of the JBoss Application Platform with an OEM, Red Hat and Dell today announced that Dell will be shipping its PowerEdge servers with the JBoss Enterprise Application Platform or the Red Hat Application Stack, which includes Red Hat Enterprise Linux, JBoss Enterprise Application Platform and MySQL.
Most interestingly (though not surprisingly), you can get JBoss Enteprise Application Platform preintegrated and bundled with Windows, too.
The Dell/Red Hat offering features three solutions:
- JBoss Enterprise Application Platform: This combines the JBoss Application Server, Hibernate and JBoss Seam with Dell hardware and the customer's choice of Linux or Windows....
- Web Application: This offering combines the Red Hat Application Stack, including the JBoss Enterprise Application Platform and Red Hat Enterprise Linux, with Dell hardware. It is ideal for running Java or LAMP applications....
- Web Edge: Combining Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Dell hardware, this solution helps customers take advantage of the open-source operating system for activities such as Web serving with Apache.
Also of note is the Java Solutions Center on which Dell, AMD and Red Hat are collaborating in Austin, Texas. It's designed to focus on the development and optimization of open-source Java technologies. It's good to see Red Hat move beyond maintenance mode on its JBoss property and start to push the innovation envelope on JBoss.
Red Hat has been heads-down for so long on the operating system (OS) that anything to extend its vision beyond the OS is a big positive. Five years from now, if Red Hat were still fixated on the OS to exclusion of the stack above the OS, it would stagnate.
From my own discussions with Red Hat rank-and-file and management, JBoss is having a positive effect on the company's vision. It's unhealthy to view the software world through just one lens. JBoss is giving Red Hat a more sophisticated view of the market.
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. 
