SOA Software, a vendor of security, management and governance products for services-oriented architectures, is partnering with Red Hat to make its products available with JBoss open source middleware.
JBoss, which has been a division of Red Hat since being purchased by the company last year, makes the JBoss Enterprise Middleware Suite, a set of products including application servers that allow businesses to create and deploy applications and Web services.
The companies announced Monday that they will market their products together and create a tighter partnership to deliver customer service. The initial focus will be on deploying SOA Software products with JBoss application servers. Red Hat will also work with SOA Software to support the JBoss Enterprise Service Bus.
"We're signaling that open source is ready for prime time in the enterprise SOA," says Roberto Medrano, executive vice president of SOA Software.
SOA Software competes in a busy field that just in the past few weeks has seen announcements of new products and strategies from Vitria Technology IBM, Sun and Infor.
JBoss has supported SOA deployments since about 2003, says Pierre Fricke, director of product line management for SOA products at JBoss. But JBoss hasn't focused on governance, security and management in SOA environments, and this partnership with SOA Software fills that gap, he says.
Service-oriented architecture is an approach to building IT systems that's centered around the deployment of reusable application components.
SOA Software's security, management and governance tools start at US$5,000 per server. The company has tried to differentiate itself from bigger names in the software industry by making its products compatible with any type of application server.
"We can govern all proprietary and nonproprietary platforms," Medrano says. "The normal way of business, whether it's IBM or BEA or Oracle, they try to keep you in their platform and their single application stack."
The JBoss Enterprise Middleware Suite is freely downloadable, with JBoss providing support on a subscription basis.