Who's the boss?
The open source Java middleware outfit, based in Atlanta, is making a ton of new product announcements:
- A distributed transaction management system based on ArjunaTS, acquired last December.
- An enterprise-grade JBoss Messaging Server, and JBoss Web server.
- JBoss Rules, based on the Drools project, acquired last October.
- An upgrade of JBoss jBPM
A spokesman wrote me, "The secret sauce is really the developer talent. They draw in the community, they bring innovative new ideas forward that excite of the community (e.g., JBoss Seam ), they get mobbed at shows. You have the founder of Hibernate leading the Seam effort. You have a web services spec author leading the Transactions and ESB effort. You have the lead developer of Apache mod_jk saying, we can do better than this, and you have JBoss Web Server."
Vice president-product management Shaun Connolly, who is actually based near Philadelphia, said the point of all this is to make JBoss an enterprise-grade solution.
"Our middleware suite is the number one open source platform for SOA. Our competitors are now clearly BEA and IBM. One of our top industries is financial services and they’re not doing lightweight stuff."
I should add I’m based in Atlanta and this has been a very bad year for Atlanta companies. Georgia-Pacific was taken private. Scientific-Atlanta was bought by Cisco. Delta Air is going down. BellSouth was bought-out by AT&T. Even Coca-Cola is now smaller than Pepsi.
JBoss is now talking of going public. Speaking as a local, I hope they do.