Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE: RHT), the world's leading provider of open source solutions, today rolled out its middleware strategy to drive the next migration to an Open Source Architecture with the announcement of an agreement to acquire MetaMatrix and the introduction of new JBoss offerings. Last month's delivery of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 continues the Unix-to-Linux migration that has returned millions of dollars in value to customers over the last five years. Now, Red Hat is presenting the next high value migration opportunity, which Red Hat believes will deliver even greater cost savings to enterprises: moving siloed legacy applications to JBoss Enterprise Middleware.
"With many enterprises spending as much as 70% of their IT budget on maintaining stove-piped legacy applications while a backlog of projects continues piling up, it's clear that proprietary application infrastructure vendors have failed to deliver relief for the CIO," said Tim Yeaton, Senior Vice President of Enterprise Solutions, Red Hat. "Until now, enterprises have had to choose from solutions with high acquisition, high integration, and high lock-in costs. By applying the attributes that made Red Hat Enterprise Linux the number one Unix migration platform to our JBoss Enterprise Middleware, Red Hat is providing customers a migration path to long-term value, choice, and control of their IT infrastructure."
Siloed legacy applications hardwired to data sources have created inflexible application infrastructures that prohibit shared corporate IT assets, data reuse, interoperability, and business agility. JBoss Enterprise Middleware offers an open, low-cost, high-value migration foundation for customers to modernize these legacy application infrastructures to service-oriented architectures (SOA). Today's new developer and enterprise support subscriptions dramatically simplify the use of JBoss Enterprise Middleware for SOA across the application life cycle. When complete, the MetaMatrix acquisition will add a federated data services SOA layer for JBoss Enterprise Middleware that enables data to be exposed as services for integration, workflow, and business process modeling.
MetaMatrix Unlocks Data for SOA
Red Hat has signed a definitive agreement to acquire the business of MetaMatrix, a leader in data management and integration software. This market is estimated to reach $1.3B in 2007 according to Forrester Research. The consummation of the transaction is subject to the satisfaction of certain conditions to closing set forth in the acquisition agreement. Once the transaction is completed, MetaMatrix will be integrated into Red Hat's JBoss division.
While SOA offers a cost-effective opportunity to modernize legacy infrastructures and provide true interoperability across applications and software components, it alone does not resolve data access challenges and the physical and semantic differences among disparate, physical data sources. MetaMatrix eliminates these challenges with a data services layer that decouples applications from their data sources and makes valuable data assets available as services in an SOA, freeing data from single application silos. It does this while simultaneously providing mechanisms for data consistency, security and compliance.
Ray Lane, General Partner with Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and MetaMatrix Board Member, applauded the acquisition and its implications for the future of data management: "IT infrastructure is continuously evolving and enterprises are always looking for low-risk, low-TCO solutions that will help them keep up with the changes while ensuring that the datatheir most valuable assetremains relevant, accessible, and reusable in any situation. We see federated data services as key to this, which is why we invested in MetaMatrix. Red Hat has a clear vision for providing an end-to-end, open source infrastructure that addresses these needs, and we are pleased that these two visionary companies will now work as one to deliver valuable solutions for customers' data management needs."
JBoss Enterprise Platform Subscriptions
To accelerate this next migration and make it easier for customers to build on and deploy JBoss Enterprise Middleware, Red Hat is moving away from the current a la carte approach where customers mix and match different components to suit their IT projects to a set of integrated, tested, and certified JBoss Enterprise Platform distributions for the most common use cases. These new distributions come as a single download and are supported by a fully inclusive subscription with automated update and patch stream and multi-year service level agreements (SLAs).
When CitiStreet, a global benefits provider supporting over 12 million participants, needed to upgrade its benefits record-keeping portal to accommodate ongoing growth, it migrated to JBoss for its scalability, cost efficiency, and open access to the code base. CIO Barry Strasnick commented: "The ability to avoid vendor lock-in, accessibility to the code, and developer support were key factors we were looking for. Overall, the JBoss solution is superior, costs less, and they do a better job of supporting us than our previous vendors. As a result, we continue in our evolution to move all production boxes to an open source environment. We are comfortable moving our mission-critical applications to JBoss and Red Hat."
Fully inclusive subscription support is available now for the JBoss Enterprise Application Platform. The Application Platform helps customers easily deploy and host applications and web services. It integrates several products into a single distribution: JBoss Application Server for business logic and clustering; Hibernate for object/relational mapping and persistence; and JBoss Seam for building next-generation Web 2.0 applications. Future JBoss Enterprise Platform offerings will be available for portal applications, SOA integration and business process automation requirements.
JBoss.org Enhancements
With the creation of JBoss Enterprise Platform distributions, Red Hat is freeing up the JBoss.org community from the constraints of the productization process so it can focus on what it does best: innovate. The newly redesigned and rebranded JBoss.org site debuted today with new tools and developer-focused content to enhance the participant experience. JBoss.org remains the the R&D hotbed for JBoss Enterprise Platforms, but from today onwards, its 30-plus projects will have more latitude to deliver bleeding edge technologies faster to users. Once these releases are enterprise-ready, they will be integrated into JBoss Enterprise Platform distributions. Project releases remain freely available for download under an LGPL, GPL, or Apache open source license. Ad-hoc support for JBoss.org releases will be provided through the community.
Red Hat Developer Subscriptions
Building on the partnership with Exadel that was announced in March 2007, Red Hat also introduced today new Red Hat Developer Support Subscriptions. Designed to help both corporate developers and independent software vendors (ISVs) jump-start their SOA, Java, and Linux development projects, Red Hat Developer Support Subscriptions offer guaranteed service levels that support developers from development to production. Red Hat Developer Support Subscriptions are available with two different SLA options, offer unlimited support inquiries, and cover all JBoss Enterprise and Red Hat Enterprise Linux offerings. Later in 2007, Red Hat will release Red Hat Developer Studio, an open source development environment that integrates Eclipse-based tooling with JBoss and Red Hat Enterprise solutions.
Training and Certification
To support the roll out of these new subscription offerings, Red Hat will offer training and certification to customers and channel partners worldwide. The new offerings simplify how customers and channel partners may augment their current Red Hat solutions with JBoss Enterprise Middleware capabilities. More details will be available soon. ISV partners can contact partners-helpdesk@redhat.com for additional information.
Availability
With this announcement, customers will benefit from a high-value, low-cost Open Source Architecture on which to modernize their IT infrastructure.
- JBoss.org community drives open source innovation and collaboration;
- Red Hat Developer subscriptions enable rapid application development and deployment;
- JBoss Enterprise Platforms provide an integrated, secure, fully supported runtime environment; and
- MetaMatrix products provide federated data management to free corporate data for next generation SOA.
Most of these capabilities are available today worldwide from Red Hat Sales Representatives, Red Hat resellers, and the Red Hat Store (http://www.redhat.com/wapps/store). JBoss.org project releases are available for download in their entirety at www.jboss.org.
Following the close of the MetaMatrix acquisition, its data management software will be prepared for release under an open source license at JBoss.org. MetaMatrix software includes a metadata management system, a server-based runtime, design and testing tools, and an administrative console. For additional information about MetaMatrix, please visit http://www.redhat.com or email metamatrixquestions@redhat.com.
About Red Hat, Inc.
Red Hat, the world's leading open source solutions provider, is headquartered in Raleigh, NC with over 50 satellite offices spanning the globe. CIOs have ranked Red Hat first for value in Enterprise Software for three consecutive years in the CIO Insight Magazine Vendor Value study. Red Hat provides high-quality, low-cost technology with its operating system platform, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, together with applications, management and Services Oriented Architecture (SOA) solutions, including the JBoss Enterprise Middleware Suite. Red Hat also offers support, training and consulting services to its customers worldwide. Learn more: http://www.redhat.com.
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Red Hat is the world’s leading provider of open source software solutions, using a community-powered approach to reliable and high-performing cloud, Linux, middleware, storage and virtualization technologies. Red Hat also offers award-winning support, training, and consulting services. As the connective hub in a global network of enterprises, partners, and open source communities, Red Hat helps create relevant, innovative technologies that liberate resources for growth and prepare customers for the future of IT. Learn more at http://www.redhat.com.
- Forward-Looking Statements
Certain statements contained in this press release may constitute "forward-looking statements" within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Forward-looking statements provide current expectations of future events based on certain assumptions and include any statement that does not directly relate to any historical or current fact. Actual results may differ materially from those indicated by such forward-looking statements as a result of various important factors, including: risks related to delays or reductions in information technology spending; the effects of industry consolidation; the ability of the Company to compete effectively; the integration of acquisitions and the ability to market successfully acquired technologies and products; uncertainty and adverse results in litigation and related settlements; the inability to adequately protect Company intellectual property and the potential for infringement or breach of license claims of or relating to third party intellectual property; the ability to deliver and stimulate demand for new products and technological innovations on a timely basis; risks related to data and information security vulnerabilities; ineffective management of, and control over, the Company’s growth and international operations; fluctuations in exchange rates; and changes in and a dependence on key personnel, as well as other factors contained in our most recent Quarterly Report on Form 10-Q (copies of which may be accessed through the Securities and Exchange Commission’s website at http://www.sec.gov), including those found therein under the captions "Risk Factors" and "Management’s Discussion and Analysis of Financial Condition and Results of Operations". In addition to these factors, actual future performance, outcomes, and results may differ materially because of more general factors including (without limitation) general industry and market conditions and growth rates, economic and political conditions, governmental and public policy changes and the impact of natural disasters such as earthquakes and floods. The forward-looking statements included in this press release represent the Company’s views as of the date of this press release and these views could change. However, while the Company may elect to update these forward-looking statements at some point in the future, the Company specifically disclaims any obligation to do so. These forward-looking statements should not be relied upon as representing the Company’s views as of any date subsequent to the date of this press release.
