Customers Drive Innovation In Red Hat Enterprise MRG

Today we announced the availability of version one of Red Hat Enterprise MRG, delivering on the announcement of the MRG beta made in December 2007. Our customers and partners alike have contributed immensely to the innovation that has resulted in MRG – we’ll focus on the contributions from our MRG beta customers to date in this blog, but be sure to see the highlights of our partner contributions as well.

Beta customers become involved in projects with Red Hat as early innovators and adopters of our solutions to help us define future releases and bring innovative solutions to market quickly. We’re sounding boards for each other to see what tweaks and patterns work best in different project architectures, what challenges custom workloads will face so that we can provide improved performance and a compelling solution to customers at GA.

The MRG beta program involved a number of beta customers that had significant impact on today’s MRG version one. JPMC, Goldman, Credit Suisse, Deutsche Borse and others have been largely involved in the development of our messaging capabilities through their work with the AMQP (Advanced Message Queing Protocol) Working Group. AMQP is an open Internet protocol for business messaging that incorporates the collaboration of member companies to help determine more powerful messaging technologies for businesses. The group was born out of the frustration of users who wanted messaging components to be an enabler, and not an obstacle. The creation of a standard in the messaging space will enable interoperability amongst various vendors, create an ecosystem around the messaging space and bring powerful value and technologies like other standards such as TCP or HTTP have done.

Interestingly, and providing proof of the power of customer-driven innovation, many members of AMQP are the largest known messaging users and are also Red Hat customers and partners who have helped drive the delivery of MRG. Our messaging implementation has large customers and partners participating in the open source projects, and the DDG 1000 program, a revolutionary, multi-mission destroyer, played a prominent role in the customer-feedback loop around the realtime capabilities in MRG. See more about the early contributors to MRG here.

Since the beta began in December 2007, our customers and users have helped us determine new features and have helped us track performance. For example, we introduced message broker federation capabilities at the request of one of our large customers. A large investment bank saw a 15 percent improvement in latency and signficantly better determinism as it validated the MRG realtime kernel.

Today’s Enterprise Messaging and Realtime capabilities are available and supported in North America and Europe, with a technology preview of the solution’s Grid capabilties. MRG 1.1 is expected during the second half of 2008 and will be fully supported around the globe. See www.redhat.com/mrg.