Red Hat's JBoss dons BlackTie to target BEA Tuxedo
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InfoWorld - Red Hat on Thursday revealed a JBoss middleware project aimed at displacing BEA's Tuxedo transaction-monitoring engine, which has a significant legacy install base.
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Red Hat is acquiring security and authentication tools from Netscape Security Solutions to bolster its software arsenal. Red Hat&#39;s CEO and chairman Matthew Szulik spoke about the future strategy of the Linux supplier.
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(InfoWorld) - Red HatÂ has scheduled a March release for RHEL5 (Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5), the latest version of its open-source operating system, while it tries to fend off new competitive threats from OracleÂ and the Microsoft-NovellÂ partnership. Red Hat CTO Brian Stevens discussed the RHEL5, the competition, the Fedora Project, and other issues with IDG News Service. Following is an edited transcript of the interview, conducted this week at the InfoWorld Virtualization Executive Forum in San Francisco: IDGNS:Â RHEL5 comes out in March. What are some of the features that will move virtualization forward and keep Red Hat competitive? Stevens: RHEL5 is a scalable, full native 64-bit platform. In the second quarter of 2005, there was a crossover point where more 64-bit x86 systems were sold than 32-bit systems. So there is this untapped (64-bit) capability within the IT shops as many systems are still running 32-bit applications on 64-bit systems. With RHEL5, we aim to help allow IT and independent software vendorsÂ to realize the power of 64-bit computing on these multicore architectures. There is a lot of untapped capability in performance there, so we aim to help that. As to virtualization, it comes as an integrated feature set for RHEL5. IDGNS: How has the move by Oracle to undercut you on the price for its Linux support and the partnership between MicrosoftÂ and NovellÂ affected the direction you are taking Red Hat as CTO? Stevens: It hasn't really affected the day-to-day activities because Red Hat is focused on creating value for customers. We have developed really close relationships to understand where we need to drive technology to make a meaningful impact on their businesses. We focus on the fundamentals, not on something else. If you start to think about what is going to create revenue for the company versus what's going to create value for the customer, you're thinking about it the wrong way. Our results for the last quarter show that we are largely unaffected. We look at the vibrancy of the Fedora Project, our open-source community. Fedora is Red Hat's vehicle for bringing advanced technology really quickly to end-users. The last release of Fedora has been out for about four months, and we are averaging more than 100,000 downloads a week and 1.5 million downloads total. Compare that 100,000 a week to Oracle with their release of Oracle Linux. We reach in seven hours what they reached in their very first month of releasing that source code. With the Novell-Microsoft deal, we continue to believe interoperability is important. We didn't see anything new and meaningful in that interoperability agreement. With RHEL5, we're going to show rich compatibility between Windows and Linux. We already have that. We are absolutely open to and willing to work with Microsoft under an interoperability agreement but one that does not require our customers to pay anÂ intellectual property tax on Linux. IDGNS: What are your projects for the coming year besides RHEL5? Stevens: We'll continue an initiative we started last year around AMQP (Advanced Message Queuing Protocol). It's going to transform how you manage messaging systems in grid environments. We'll be bringing that to a bunch of (test) customers this year. AMQP is about allowing you to have data sources and data feeds that can scale across grid environments. IDGNS: What else? Stevens: We're leading the work in Linux around predictability with a project called Real Time. It's not just about dropping latency, even though it does that. It's around how we get determinism. It's really critical that the workloads you're running, whether its multimedia playback or transactions, know that there is a sort of boundary on the completion of transactions. Real Time is basically a rearchitecture of how the Linux kernel does locking and scheduling. We've had a team working on this for the past year and a half and we will be working with customers under a proof of concept through the course of this year.
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New marketing and technical resources will bolster Red Hat's effort to promote JBoss in corporations.
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OCTOBER 01, 2004  - After his company announced that it&#39;s acquiring security and authentication tools from Netscape Security Solutions to bolster its software arsenal (see story), Red Hat Inc.
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There&#39;s a fake security alert targeting users of Red Hat&#39;s Fedora distribution, the company warned in an advisory. The Linux distributor posted a note on its security updates page to caution users against downloading security updates received via e-mail.
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(InfoWorld) - Red Hat and Exadel are joining forces to try to make the open source Red Hat platform more of a destination for software developers. The two companies will offer Eclipse-based developer tools for building applications for Red Hat Enterprise Linux and JBoss Enterprise Middleware, Red Hat and Exadel said. "If you take a look at where Red Hat's business was a couple years ago, it was primarily around migration of production systems to Enterprise Linux," said Brian Che, Red Hat product manager. But now, Red Hat wants developers to build new applications, Che said. This week's announcement follows last year's purchase of JBoss as part of Red Hat's strategy. Through an arrangement being announced at the EclipseCon conference in Santa Clara, Calif., on Monday, Exadel will open source all of its products, including the Exadel Studio Pro Web development environment and the RichFaces AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML) components platform. Exadel Studio Pro, which is based on the Eclipse platform, will be renamed Red Hat Developer Studio. Also, Exadel's Ajax4jsf, which is a framework for JavaServer Faces applications that use AJAX, will be consolidated under the JBoss.org umbrella. Red Hat will work with Exadel to drive development of these projects and integrate them with JBoss middleware technologies such as the JBoss Seam application framework. In offering its products via open source, Exadel is seeking to increase awareness of its technologies and sell application-building services around them. "We believe that this gives us more visibility," said Donna Burke, Exadel vice president. Red Hat, meanwhile, will support the products itself. The Red Hat and Exadel arrangement provides a new twist on partnerships in that it is not an acquisition and provides just a potential for future revenues from services, said Raven Zachary, senior analyst with The 451 Group. "Here you've got two commercial firms exchanging IP (intellectual property) with only a promise of revenue-sharing in the future. It's a fascinating model," Zachary said. "There's a risk here for Exadel," in giving away its IP, but Exadel believes the move provides greater opportunities, Zachary said. RichFaces and Ajax4jsf provide models for building rich Internet and Web 2.0 applications, Red Hat said. When combining these Exadel developer tools with JBoss Enterprise Middleware, Red Hat can offer a development and deployment platform for developers to assemble SOA components and Web 2.0 applications with less coding, Red Hat and Exadel said. RichFaces and Ajax4jsf are available now as JBoss RichFaces and JBoss Ajax4jsf on JBoss.org under the LGPL (Lesser GNU General Public License). Red Hat is working to open source Exadel Studio Pro as Red Hat Developer Studio under the GNU GPL (General Public License), with availability planned for later in the first half of 2007. Red Hat also plans to introduce a Red Hat developer assistance program. The effort will feature a developer portal that at present has been known by the code name of 108. Also at EclipseCon, AccuRev plans to announce enhancements to its AccuBridge for Eclipse plug, allowing Eclipse developers to access AccuRev software configuration management functionality from within the Eclipse IDE. Performance and usability enhancements in version 4.5.1 of the plug-in include the ability to synchronize a local development workspace with other developers' changes, a customizable AccuRev perspective to view the collection of windows most important to developers, and support for the Eclipse Update Manager. AccuRev also plans to announce it has hired David Jabs as vice president of engineering. He was a founding architect of IBM Rational ClearCase while at Atria Software, AccuRev said.
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(InfoWorld) - BEA Systems will ship the three products featured in its social computing suite geared for Web 2.0 on Monday. The three products introduce modes of ad hoc collaboration and participation-driven experiences, said Jay Simons, BEA director of product marketing. Additionally, they take innovations spawned on the consumer Internet and apply them to the enterprise, adding security, governance, and management, he said. With the products, BEA is looking to empower users in the workplace, the company said. All bearing the AquaLogic nameplate, the three products include: * Pages, which is a mashup builder for business users to put together simple Web applications for business situations. * Ensemble, for Web application developers to build developer-oriented mashups featuring Web resources. * Pathways, featuring social bookmarking, tagging, and the ability to form social networks in an enterprise context. In touting its new products, BEA has been able to communicate how the suite can make a business become more efficient, said analyst Frank Kenney, research director at Gartner. BEA has been citing examples involving mashups and applications, he said. "Theyâre starting to tell stories and give credible examples of how those Web 2.0 [capabilities] can make your business agile," Kenney said. But BEA has been lacking in details on how governance and control are maintained over the applications built with the products, he said. "I think that I havenât seen enough detail about the mechanics of the technology. For instance, BEA hasn't given me a message or hasn't told me about how these technologies fit into their overall SOA governance initiatives," Kenney said. A Java application server is required to use the products but not necessarily BEA's application server, Simons said. Pricing for the products individually is either $40,000 per CPU or $64 per user.
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(InfoWorld) - French systems and services provider Bull has formed a broad partnership with JBoss that could see theÂ Red Hat subsidiary's open-source middleware used more widely in Europe. As part of the deal, Bull will resell subscriptions to JBoss' software and provide first- and second-tier support for it, with Red Hat providing third-tier technical support, the companies announced Tuesday. Bull will also join the community of developers that contribute to JBoss, and it will become a JBoss systems integrator partner, adding the JBoss Enterprise Middleware Suite to the software choices that Bull offers to clients. The deal builds on an existing partnership with Red Hat and is the first strategic research and development partnership that JBoss has signed in Europe, the companies said. The deal may also provide aÂ boost for ObjectWeb, the French middleware consortium that was cofounded by Bull and that developed the open-source Jonas application server. Red Hat has been a close partner of ObjectWeb and helped with theÂ development of Jonas. When it bought JBoss, however, Red Hat shifted the focus of its development efforts to the JBoss middleware. With Tuesday's deal, Red Hat will now strengthen its involvement with ObjectWeb, the companies announced. The deal will give ObjectWeb "a strategic partnership with JBoss" that will "enforce the cross-fertilization and interoperability of open-source middleware developments," a Bull executive said in a statement. Red Hat will also work closely with Bull on "the future development and extension of ObjectWeb," the companies said. The announcement was made at the JBoss World conference taking place this week in Berlin. ObjectWeb is in the midst of an effort to become a more business-friendly and marketing-savvy organization. Earlier this year it said it would become a nonprofit legal entity, making it easier for it to sign business contracts. It has also held a contest to come up with a new name for itself, which could be announced shortly. Â ADVERTISEMENTNEW IT SERVICES FROM IBM: EASIER TO BUY AND IMPLEMENTDiscover a simpler, more cost-effective way to get the solutions your company needs to grow more flexible and efficient.
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Two years ago today, Red Hat CEO Matthew Szulik confirmed the purhase of two prized enterprise products from AOL - Netscape Directory Server and Netscape Certificate Management System. He also noted than Red Hat intended to open source the products within 12 months.  Red Hat paid $25 million for the assets. You could say that was pretty good considering that in 1998, AOL paid more than $4 billion for Netscape. Matthew's purchase represented the last divestiture of Netscape's assets by AOL. If you wander on over to the Fedora Directory Server (FDS) site you can take a look at an enhanced version of the Netscape Directory Server. This isn't your older brother's directory server. Aside from open sourcing the Netscape server, you'll find an abundance of documentation to help you learn and operate a stellar product. In the case you have little familiarity with FDS, it has features you will not find in other open source LDAP servers.  These include: Multi-master replication  Hot-backups and restores  Integration utility for Microsoft Active Directory users and groups  A graphical management console and web available administration
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Red Hat posted a notice on their web site about fake emails that purport to come from them. Here is the statement in its entirety: &quot;Red Hat has been made aware that emails are circulating that pretend to come from the Red Hat Security Team.
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JBoss founder Marc Fleury has resurfaced as a paid advisor to Appcelerator, a startup based in Atlanta that makes a toolkit for developing rich Internet applications (RIA).Red Hat bought JBoss, a maker of open source middleware, in 2006 for $350 million. The outspoken Fleury oversaw Red Hat&#39;s JBoss division until quitting early this year, and since then has largely avoided the limelight.He said he hopes to raise Appcelerator&#39;s profile in the increasingly crowded RIA space, which is led by the likes of Adobe&#39;s Flex, among others.&quot;The big dog is clearly Flex,&quot; Fleury said, but &quot;the fact that it is so crowded and there is no clear winner is also an indication there is a market of opportunity.&quot;Fleury described his role with Appcelerator as his &quot;first engagement with the industry&quot; since leaving JBoss. &quot;I liked the product, I liked the tech, and figured I could help.&quot;But Fleury said he essentially remains retired: &quot;My other projects include family.&quot;Fleury is the second former JBoss employee to join Appcelerator, following the company&#39;s hiring of Ben Sabrin as vice president of strategy and business development.The company describes its Appcelerator Platform as ideal for creating what it calls &quot;service-oriented user interfaces.&quot;The platform provides an abstraction layer that allows developers to use AJAX and DHTML without needing to program in JavaScript themselves, and provides a widget library for pulling together common components. The platform is available under a GPLv2 license, and the company has created software development kits for Java, Ruby, PHP, .Net, and Python.&quot;We&#39;re really focusing on RIA-enabling the enterprise,&quot; said CEO Jeff Haynie.
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The introduction of a new version of its Linux distribution and new JBoss software helped Red Hat Inc. increase profit to US$16.2 million, or $0.08 a share, on revenue of $118.9 million, in its fiscal first quarter ended May 31, the company reported Wednesday.
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Blog: Winner will be announced at this year's Black Hat conference.
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When Matthew Szulik left Red Hat abruptly for family health reasons in December, many people were scratching their heads over the company&#39;s new choice of CEO: a young executive from Delta Airlines, Jim Whitehurst. But Whitehurst&#39;s chief operating officer title at Delta and position outside of the technology industry are misleading; a peek into his past reveals a computer science degree and a passion for open source technology, not to mention a smooth operator who helped bring a struggling airline out of bankruptcy.Still, Whitehurst, 40, has big shoes to fill in replacing Szulik, the man who took a small, unknown company and turned it into a savvy business competitor that made Linux a household name and struck fear in the hearts of much bigger rivals&#160;such as&#160;Microsoft. Today, Red Hat is the leading Linux vendor and is financially sound, but the company is in a pivotal phase of reinventing itself as a broader open source software provider and a multibillion-dollar technology leader that can compete long-term with much larger companies.Whitehurst spoke with IDG News Service this week about the key findings of his first month on the job and where he thinks Red Hat should focus its attention to evolve at a sustainable pace. This is an edited version of that interview.IDGNS: I was surprised to find out that you have a computer science background when I heard you came to Red Hat as COO from Delta Airlines. I didn&#8217;t expect you to be such a techie.Whitehurst: I do have geek cred. For some reason, your reputation is always based on your prior experience. When I was at the airline, people said, &quot;Who is this strategy consultant running an airline?&quot; Now I&#39;m an airline guy running a technology company. I wish I was called an airline guy when I was at the airline!IDGNS: Was this a personal interest in open source that led you to Red Hat? Was Delta a big user of Linux?Whitehurst: Delta certainly uses some REL (Red Hat Enterprise Linux) and JBoss, but it&#39;s more of a personal interest. I was hacking around with Slackware, one of the early Linuxes that was out there in the &#39;90s, and an early adopter and user of Fedora all the way through when I got the call for joining Red Hat. It&#39;s always been a passion of mine, so the opportunity to get out there to lead is an extraordinary privilege and honor for me.IDGNS: Red Hat is currently in a great position as leader of the Linux market and has been doing well financially, but the company has been called upon by Wall Street to grow and possibly diversify the business. When you look at the company, what are its biggest challenges right now?Whitehurst: Let me start off by saying I&#39;ve only been here a few weeks. The first month [has basically been] going out on the road with customers, employees, with investors, with analysts, with our partners-slash-competitors and really trying to get a sense of the business, what&#8217;s working well and what&#8217;s not. The good news is, most things are working well -- from the standpoint of being a very healthy business growing rapidly with healthy financials.I think you&#8217;re right there are certainly areas where we can do a better job. First off, I would just say the general organizational focus. We actually do a lot of different things, support a lot of different projects. We have to be careful that we&#8217;re focusing on the right things and putting our investment dollars where they&#8217;ll have the most impact. I&#39;m still going through the details of what we do and what we don&#39;t do, so stay tuned on that.A second area where there&#8217;s still a lot of opportunity for Red Hat would be basically [in] processes and systems, including IT systems and governance, especially for a company that&#39;s grown so rapidly. A lot of those processes and systems and ways of doing business are different for a company like Red Hat that&#39;s [US]$500 million on its way to a multibillion-dollar company than they are for a small company. Some time and attention on basic execution to make sure we have the processes and systems in place to grow, and grow healthily, are another area where I plan to spend a fair amount of time.IDGNS: And what about your experience makes you well-suited to help meet those challenges and diversify Red Hat&#39;s products beyond Linux into more of a full open source software provider?Whitehurst: For starters, I am an operator. I am pretty good at getting a company to focus, and focus on a few things. We certainly did that at Delta and did that well in the turnaround. Obviously, having come from a larger company and having run a larger company, I have a good sense of the processes and systems we need to make sure governance [and] processes work well.About whether we need to diversify or not: People are asking, &quot;Well, should we have bought [open source database company] MySQL?&quot; [Editor&#39;s note: Sun Microsystems said last month it is&#160;buying MySQL for about $1 billion.] We are still a very small-share player in the server OS market and a small-share player in middleware [with JBoss]. If you look at the quality of our technology, it&#39;s the best. We feel very good about that. We still have basic execution to do to reach our full potential in the markets we&#39;re in. So I don&#39;t feel the need to diversify until we nail the product and are fully [satisfied] with our existing products. I&#39;m not sure we want to divert our time and attention to other things.IDGNS: A lot of people have been critical of Red Hat for what it&#8217;s done so far with JBoss, and think success with this is key to proving Red Hat can evolve beyond Linux. How are you going to make that business more successful?Whitehurst: Obviously execution and commercial execution will be big focuses going forward [for JBoss]. We fundamentally changed the JBoss business model from a big consulting/support [business] to our enterprise/.org models that we had with REL [on the enterprise side] and Fedora [on the .org side]. It has, without a doubt, proven to be a very successful model, and one could argue it&#39;s about the only demonstrated successful model of any size with open source. In the same way we have Fedora and REL, we have the .org version of JBoss and the enterprise edition. JBoss had a different business model before, but we think our business model has proven the most successful and the most durable. It&#39;s the right decision. It just takes a while.The good news of that also shows that it&#8217;s not easy to develop a good business model around open source, so it&#39;s a relatively defensible model going forward. We feel very good about where JBoss is. ... We think we can grow twice as fast as the core REL business.Red Hat&#8217;s never been involved in any material way in the application components of the stack. We do provide a full open source stack with the LAMP stack. We will continue to do that, so we&#39;re playing there to some extent. In terms of our focus and where we&#39;ll invest our team and attention and dollars, the [market for the] infrastructure component of software worldwide is close to $100 billion. We&#39;re a $500 million software company. I would argue we&#39;ve barely scratched the surface. I&#39;d much rather we make sure we make progress there than get into the CRM business. Once we&#39;ve achieved our full potential in our core businesses, we can open the aperture. But I want to make sure the company is focused on the potential of our businesses in that core market.IDGNS: Microsoft is coming out with Windows Server 2008 pretty soon. Do you see this as a good opportunity to snag Windows customers who may be thinking of upgrading and instead moving them over to Linux? Is there still competition in this space, or will it always be the Linux camp sticks with Linux, and the Windows camp sticks with Windows?Whitehurst: We&#8217;re seeing a lot of migrations from Microsoft to Linux, from Unix to Linux or even Unix to Microsoft. There&#39;s a big battleground out there. Anytime there is a significant upgrade or change, there is an opportunity for us. Anytime a customer stands back and says, &quot;Let me reassess this&quot; and &quot;Do we want to upgrade?&quot; that&#39;s great for us because our value proposition is much more compelling for our competitors. Whenever there is a reason for customers to reassess, that gives us an opportunity to show our value, so we&#39;ll be out there aggressively this year.IDGNS: Much was made of Microsoft&#39;s interoperability deal with Novell in November 2006. Has that deal hurt Red Hat in any way? Do you even view Novell as a major competitor anymore?Whitehurst: There may be a deal or two out there, but it hasn&#8217;t come up to my level. We really don&#8217;t see them that much in the market. They&#39;re not really a factor. Given our market share and certified ecosystems of partners -- [those] really drive our position.IDGNS: Are you worried about&#160;Microsoft&#39;s patent claims against Linux, which were recently&#160;dismissed again by Linus Torvalds?Whitehurst: We&#8217;ve spent a lot of time looking at that, and we have an assurance program for our customers, so they don&#39;t need to worry. Microsoft for years now has talked about 235 patents [that they own that Linux violates], but they&#8217;ve yet to tell us any of them and we continue to ask, &quot;Show us what they are.&quot; How many times can you keep saying it before you pass on the opportunity to do anything? At first people got concerned, but after years and years and years, you recognize it&#39;s a lot of bark and no bite. We never want to take any claims of intellectual property violations lightly, but those have been around so long with absolutely nothing behind them. After a while, it becomes harder and harder to take those seriously.IDGNS: Where would you like to see Red Hat be in five years?Whitehurst: Again, this company is currently the open source leader. Open source is still really a nascent part of the IT infrastructure in corporate America. As the leader of open source, one of the things we need to do, and should do, is foster and further open source awareness and adoption in worldwide IT. My view of success includes how well Red Hat does that in the future as a multibillion-dollar company.We want to see the continued adoption of open source as key technology across corporate IT. [We&#39;ll] continue to foster communities of use in the developing world where we operate, and communities of use where we remain sure that information and software remains free and unencumbered by proprietary formats. When we do well, we do good. We certainly have aspirations for size and growth and profitability, but we do recognize we have a role in fostering adoption and the benefits that go along with that. The great news is, this is a company in wonderful shape with a fantastic brand and market position and extraordinary, high-quality people. It&#39;s up to us not to squander that opportunity.
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Red Hat is warning users that an email purporting to be a security update may contain malicious code. The email - which began appearing last Friday - uses a security@redhat
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Linux maker Red Hat is warning users about an email that pretends to be an official security advisory but is actually a phishing-type scam that contains links to malicious code.