Progress' open source FUSE ESB makes gains in recession

Proprietary vendors are putting more muscle into the open source products they were lucky or smart enough to acquire.

Progress Software is one of those software companies. The Burlington, Mass. ESB vendor, which acquired Iona last year, has been beefing up the Fuse open source ESB platform and rapidly integrating Fuse into the company's core engineering and support teams.

Fuse ESB is based on Apache's ServiceMix. Progress also sells a proprietary Sonic ESB platform that will be retrofitted in 2009 to better support open source and open standards and mix and match Fuse components, executives say.

Version 4.0 of FUSE, which was delivered late last year, offers OSGi support. And the recently released version 4.1 offers OSGi support and a good chunk of JBI (Java Business Integration) compliance, noted Debbie Moynihan, director of Fuse at Progress Software.

"With OSGi, you can have ESB running and replace a servicde while it is running and provision a new version of the service and add it while running," she said.

Version 3.X is the current production version that offers JBI Standard support. Moynihan said the company will support both versions for quite some time.

Moynihan came from Iona and is definitely seeing an uptick in developer and customer interest in Fuse. "The current economic situation has had some impact on it," she said. "We're seeing an increase in people asking about open source. Developers are picking up open source more and more and there's more openness about it. At these times, budgets are tight and more business people are proactively asking about open source."

Progress closed its acquisition of Iona in September. Iona previously acquired fuse from LogicBlaze.