Red Hat puts its pedal to the metal

Red Hat’s latest push to woo large-scale corporate buy-in to open source middleware architecture based on JBoss Enterprise Middleware is energetically called “Enterprise Acceleration". This initiative wraps up a partner ecosystem (presumably that means a partner programme) and a new set of resources focused on enterprise-class performance and interoperability.

Although corporate adoption of open source has already gained widespread acceptance, Red Hat appears to be somewhat on the back foot and focused on increasing corporate belief and assurance in the technology’s robustness. “We are now focused on expanding further into the enterprise with a comprehensive, open source middleware portfolio and programmes to ensure confidence and success of mission-critical applications," said Craig Muzilla, vice president, Middleware Business at Red Hat.

Great stuff if you’re a corporate business manager no doubt – but what if you are a techie? Here’s what they plan to make available:

A performance tuning lab for benchmarking, testing and developing best practice guides. This will go along with an interoperability lab designed for testing with other environments and products.

There are plans for a live certification centre for ISVs and customers so they can test their applications on JBoss Enterprise Middleware and adapt to new releases. Finally, there’s a migration lab where processes, partners, services and best practices can be tuned to transition over from other software.

Although boardroom corporate “suits” may not know the internal workings of their company’s middleware from a hole in the ground – if a large proportion of IT expenditure has been pumped into low-value proprietary middleware offerings it’s likely that they’ll at least know about it. So this announcement may be a nod to the business bosses as much as it is to IT managers – a kind of ‘comfort factor’ thing all round perhaps?