Now raging: battle for the soul of JBoss

Intrepid analyst-on-the-go Tony Baer reports he's hopping between two simultaneous conferences in Orlando (JBoss and IDS Scheer). The conferences may be sharing the same conference venue, but the cultural chasm couldn't be wider, Tony observes: "On one side, a bunch of open source developers [the JBossers], on the other, a sober group of business and enterprise architects [IDS Scheer] who deal with what the JBoss crowd might otherwise consider the enemy: IBM, SAP, and Oracle."

JBoss' journey from command line to corporate

However, a similar chasm seems to be growing within the JBoss world itself: between those who want to advance the middleware server as a slicker, more GUI-ized corporate platform, and those who love it for its technical compactness (with command-line interfaces, for example).

Tony says that it's possible -- especially since Red Hat acquired the company -- that "JBoss is finally growing out of its outlaw heritage." However, JBoss now has two masters: "the installed base that likes the freedom of being able to monkey around with the appserver without losing support, and the structures of Red Hat Enterprise Linux, where changes to the supported configuration might jeopardize support."

Tony added that he found "a surprising number of JBoss Server customers who considered Red Hat Enterprise Linux was too bloated, opting for other distributions instead. Aside from Hibernate, JBoss still has its work cut out getting adoption of the portal, rules, orchestration, ESB and other parts of the platform."

This will be the challenge going forward as Red Hat JBoss seeks to offer an alternative to the Oracle/BEA, IBM, and Microsoft SOA stacks. But this is truly JBoss's time to shine as well, in the role of market disruptor. The small to middle market -- long underserved or unserved by the large infrastructure vendors -- is taking an interest in SOA. Larger vendors are only too happy to kick such low-margin commodity business to smaller vendors, but ultimately, this is where all the future lies.

Microsoft which also plays in the low-margin space, has learned how to strike a good balance between its techie and corporate constituencies. Perhaps it's an example for Red Hat JBoss to follow.