Debbie Moynihan's Blog

There was an interesting announcement this week regarding a new partnership formed between RedHat and SOA Software. What was most interesting about it is that it represents a partnership between JBOSS and SOA Software, a commercial software provider. This announcement validates my belief that there is and will continue to be a need for both open source and proprietary software components for SOA infrastructure. While there are some powerful and very innovative capabilities in the open source community today, most customers that I talk to still have needs that are not fully met by open source technology components. While many customers would like to use just open source for the cost savings and other benefits, they will select the technologies that actually solve the problem at hand. While we do have customers who are using Celtix for point projects today, they are or expect to include these in broader infrastructures that include both open and closed source technologies.  

I found it surprising that IONA wasn’t mentioned in this article over at Application Development Trends in which Jason Bloomberg from ZapThink refers to LogicBlaze and WSO2 as \”running circles\” around RedHat.  IONA has more expertise in distributed SOA infrastructure than any of the vendors mentioned.  IONA offers a distributed, holistic solution, including the best open source technologies for services creation and communication between distributed endpoints that interoperate with the best proprietary technologies for things like high availability, security framework integration, and sophisticated registry/repository capability. IONA isn’t trying to build an integrated stack, but rather to enable lightweight, distributed SOA that is flexible and cost effective. IONA recently added the new Artix Registry/Repository product to solve the challenging problem of managing truly distributed services. Chris Horn has an interesting  analogy between  governing SOA and governing a nation over at his blog (you should definitely check out his blog if you haven\’t already).

A recent Current Analysis report on IONA’s recent registry/repository announcement, for example, noted that the recent release of IONA’s Artix Registry/Repository (IARR) has a “High” market impact along with the following comments and more:

“IONA continues to shine as a unique vendor capable of leveraging its highly distributed micro-kernel architecture with customers looking to leverage existing IT infrastructure assets.”

“The addition of IARR to the company’s Artix product family immediately moves IONA ahead of pure-play ESB vendors such as JBoss and Cape Clear in terms of governance and gives the company a more even footing compared with its main competition, BEA and Software AG.” (speaking of Software AG, they announced their acquisition of WebMethods this week which was another interesting proofpoint of the market trend towards building integrated stacks via partnerships and acquisitions)

I think it will be exciting to see how the market evolves. Many have asked me if I think there will be an open source repository project eventually? Absolutely. The line between open and closed source technologies will continue to blur and move farther out in terms of functionality.Why? Because the open source projects, including those that IONA developers participate in, don’t have official product managers or artificial ceilings on functionality – the open source projects will continue to expand to meet customer needs.