JBoss sets goal: Capture 50 percent of enterprise middleware workloads by 2015

Red Hat has big plans for JBoss. With its “Enterprise Acceleration” initiative, the company hopes to gain 50 percent of enterprise middleware workloads by 2015.

Red Hat points to rising adoption of open source solutions, support from system integrators and a customer, the Swedish Police Board, as evidence that it will decisively own half the market in seven years. In addition, the company expects to add to its JBoss Enterprise Middleware stack with new platform components and is funding an Enterprise Acceleration Center for consolidating best practices and working on performance, migration and interoperability issues.

Certainly open source is becoming more broadly adopted in enterprises, but Red Hat's stated goal is purely aspiration. In essence, Red Hat is waving a red flag in front of IBM and Oracle, which just spent $8.5 billion to add BEA's middleware to its portfolio of middleware. For IBM and Oracle to cede 50 percent of the enterprise middleware market to Red Hat over the next several years would mean that the incumbents commit handfuls of forced errors, which is not likely.