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Red Hat acquires consultants to push JBoss

By | March 14, 2008, 3:22am PDT

Red Hat has acquired Amentra, a service oriented architecture consulting firm and systems integrator, to help push its JBoss middleware.

The deal, announced Thursday, gives Red Hat some foot soldiers to sell the company’s stack of software including JBoss, which has been a tough sell. Amentra will operate as an independent company.

Red Hat is trying to engage enterprises at a higher level and get in on business process management and IT architecture discussions. Amentra has 140 employees on the East coast.

Also see all JBoss and Red Hat resources.

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Red Hat Inc., JBoss, Amentra, Open Source, Java Development Tools, Development Tools, Middleware, Software Development, Software/Web Development, Enterprise Software, Software, Larry Dignan

Larry Dignan is Editor in Chief of ZDNet and SmartPlanet as well as Editorial Director of ZDNet's sister site TechRepublic.

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Larry Dignan

Larry Dignan has nothing to disclose. He doesn’t hold investments in the technology companies he covers.

Biography

Larry Dignan

Larry Dignan is Editor in Chief of ZDNet and SmartPlanet as well as Editorial Director of ZDNet's sister site TechRepublic. He was most recently Executive Editor of News and Blogs at ZDNet. Prior to that he was executive news editor at eWeek and news editor at Baseline. He also served as the East Coast news editor and finance editor at CNET News.com. Larry has covered the technology and financial services industry since 1995, publishing articles in WallStreetWeek.com, Inter@ctive Week, The New York Times, and Financial Planning magazine. He's a graduate of the Columbia School of Journalism and the University of Delaware.

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JBoss was perhaps not the wisest move
super_J 14th Mar 2008
Truth be told, I don't think RH did the best for themselves by buying JBoss.

True, I think they felt compelled to offer their customers products further up the application stack, in order to grow their business move.

But the timing wasn't right. JBoss is currently the number 3 Java Enterprise Application server, behind WebSphere and WebLogic.

But JEE App servers might be a somewhat dying bread right now. Organizations have found out the hard way that in many cases they don't need all the services a JEE app server provides, and the complexity, cost, and size that JEE app servers bring are all a big detriment.

So more and more people are going with the Tomcat (a fairly lightweight Servlet container) in combination with Spring and Hibernate. Or they're going with a multitude of web frameworks, or they're going with Ruby on Rails, or something from the LAMP stack.

For the biggest of the big shops/websites, the big JEE app servers are appropriate, because those shops need the services provided by the app servers. And for that area the big customers are willing to pay top dollar for WebLogic or WebSphere (even though WebSphere is horrible - but nobody every got fired for going IBM).

And the other point about the RH Jboss acquisition is that it annoyed RH's big brother partners, most notably Oracle and IBM, by making RH competitors with them (Oracle has it's own app server, and of course IBM has WebSphere).

But, at the same time, RH's sales keep going up and up and up. So they're doing just fine, thank you very much, JBoss under performance notwithstanding.
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0 Votes
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Usual mistake
junknstuff@... 14th Mar 2008
Red Hat bought out JBoss and then tried to sell it like linux and ignored the formula that JBoss had used in the past. Unnessesary mistake but there you have it. Oh, all the JBoss people left with their skills and enthusiasim too. JBoss developers don't care about open source at all (trust me) but they enjoy the freedom that it gives them to mould and tailor the software. People at redhat care about open source and those two cultures would never mix.
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Red Hat makes an effort.
Anton Philidor 14th Mar 2008
Red Hat is not very interested in providing paid resources for a product (as observed by the former owner of JBoss), but this purchase and other efforts shows that Red Hat is willing to fund sales efforts.

I suspect that the company realizes that any single product like Linux is at a substantial disadvantage. A company must be able to provide a great deal of well-integrated software.

So much for most standalone open source projects. If not purchased by another (proprietary) company with substantial resources, their growth prospects are limited.

Open source may be just one more commercial product these days, distinguished only by a reluctance to pay staff.
0 Votes
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... then there's reality
super_J 14th Mar 2008
JBoss on it's own - successful and profitable open source software company.

Red Hat on it's own - successful and profitable open source software company.

The combination of the two - still successful and profitable open source software company, albeit JBoss performance has been disappointing. But that's more due to the realities of the Java Enterprise market than anything else - Companies are either going the Spring/Hibernate route, or they're sticking with the "bigs" i.e. WebSphere and WebLogic.

And oh, the employees at open source software companies do get paid. Also, most of the biggest names from the JBoss dev crew are still there, namely Bill Burke and Gavin King.

So, once again, Anton Philidor reveals is woeful ignorance and rabid hatred of open source.

But hey, his trolling got me to bite, so more power to him. happy
0 Votes
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"... albeit JBoss performance has been disappointing."
Anton Philidor 14th Mar 2008
Did Red Hat buy the company to be disappointed?

Could Red Hat do better with greater investment in JBoss's products? Unless you want to argue that using resources to increase sales staff instead shows the product cannot be improved, I think we'd agree that Red Hat has avoided investment, likely because the company prefers free labor to paid.


You also wrote, "... the employees at open source software companies do get paid." Yes, can't argue with that. And I'm certain you couldn't argue with the statement that Unpaid contributors are not paid for their work.

So it seems likely that we don't disagree.
0 Votes
+ -
JBoss was perhaps not the wisest move
super_J 14th Mar 2008
Truth be told, I don't think RH did the best for themselves by buying JBoss.

True, I think they felt compelled to offer their customers products further up the application stack, in order to grow their business move.

But the timing wasn't right. JBoss is currently the number 3 Java Enterprise Application server, behind WebSphere and WebLogic.

But JEE App servers might be a somewhat dying bread right now. Organizations have found out the hard way that in many cases they don't need all the services a JEE app server provides, and the complexity, cost, and size that JEE app servers bring are all a big detriment.

So more and more people are going with the Tomcat (a fairly lightweight Servlet container) in combination with Spring and Hibernate. Or they're going with a multitude of web frameworks, or they're going with Ruby on Rails, or something from the LAMP stack.

For the biggest of the big shops/websites, the big JEE app servers are appropriate, because those shops need the services provided by the app servers. And for that area the big customers are willing to pay top dollar for WebLogic or WebSphere (even though WebSphere is horrible - but nobody every got fired for going IBM).

And the other point about the RH Jboss acquisition is that it annoyed RH's big brother partners, most notably Oracle and IBM, by making RH competitors with them (Oracle has it's own app server, and of course IBM has WebSphere).

But, at the same time, RH's sales keep going up and up and up. So they're doing just fine, thank you very much, JBoss under performance notwithstanding.

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