Red Hat Enters Matrix On a Quest for SOA

But Jason Bloomberg, senior analyst at ZapThink, thinks that Red Hat still has some building to do. “I would say there are other open source plays out there. There’s open source ESBs, and Iona bought LogicBlaze, but it’s not really about competing with those guys,” he said. “It’s about competing with commercial plays. It is a value-add. The key question is, how compelling it is? Red Hat’s overall challenge is that they don’t really have an overall SOA story.”

Read more at: SD Times

Open-Source ESBs on the Rise

“For those that want platforms, the commercial platforms are indeed getting much better, more robust and more feature-complete, so there’s nothing to complain about there,” said Ronald Schmelzer, an analyst with ZapThink. “But that does make the open-source offering attractive to those who want a best-of-breed solution from a nonplatform vendor but are finding it harder and harder to find such solutions in the current consolidating market.”

However, “we haven’t yet seen an Eclipse-type wholesale buy-in by end users into a particular open-source ESB effort,” ZapThink’s Schmelzer said. “The ESB market still is mostly dominated by the commercial players, and we have to see if an open-source effort emerges as the dominant player. That said, the more consolidation we see that requires end users to pick their platform vendor of choice, the more that we’ll see such an open-source offering come to the fore.”

Read more at: eWeek

IONA acquires LogicBlaze, supporters of ActiveMQ and ServiceMix ESB

ZapThink’s Ron Schmelzer told InfoQ that “all in all, the acquisition might fill a few gaps, but it was an opportunistic move to acquire the assets of a struggling business (probably for not much dollars).” No financial details were disclosed in the transaction.

Ron also cautioned about the need for IONA to position itself effectively, considering its dual commerical/open source offerings:

For IONA, this does a few things. First, it increases their own momentum in the Open Source arena (and their Celtix offering), and second it allows them to compete for mindshare in a market that is consolidating at an ever-increasing pace. It still begs the question about how IONA will separate its commercial offerings (Artix) from its open source offerings, and they will have a challenge in the marketplace with their positioning. Do they want to be seen as Open Source SOA or commercial? If they want to be seen as both, this is quite challenging, and we have not seen an infrastructure company successfully pull off the combination. The company needs to come out with an aggressive positioning on how it plans to accomplish both a successful open source as well as commercial offering.

Read more at: InfoQ

Iona buys LogicBlaze to boost SOA open source presence

Ron Schmelzer, senior analyst with ZapThink LLC., said this acquisition has value for the open source expertise, but he is not convinced the marketing mix of open source and traditional software products will work.

On the positive side, the analyst said the deal increases Iona’s “momentum in the open source arena and their Celtix offering, and second it allows them to compete for mindshare in a market that is consolidating at an ever-increasing pace.”

But Schmelzer said he has not seen the mix of open source and traditional products work in the market and is not sure it will work.

Of this acquisition, he said, “It still begs the question about how IONA will separate its commercial Artix offerings from its open source offerings, and they will have a challenge in the marketplace with their positioning. Do they want to be seen as open source SOA or commercial? If they want to be seen as both, this is quite challenging, and we have not seen an infrastructure company successfully pull off the combination. The company needs to come out with an aggressive positioning on how it plans to accomplish both a successful open source as well as commercial offering.”

Read more at: SearchWebServices

Iona Takes LogicBlaze for Open Source SOA

But Iona’s bread-and-butter product has for years been Artix, the company’s proprietary ESB. ZapThink analyst Ronald Schmelzer questioned Iona’s value proposition of straddling the razor-thin fence between open source and proprietary.

While Schmelzer said the buy will boost Iona’s momentum in the open source arena and allow the vendor to compete for mindshare in an SOA market that is rapidly consolidating, he wonders how IONA will separate Artix from Celtix.

“They will have a challenge in the marketplace with their positioning,” Schmelzer said. “Do they want to be seen as open source SOA or commercial?

“If they want to be seen as both, this is quite challenging, and we have not seen an infrastructure company successfully pull off the combination. The company needs to come out with an aggressive positioning on how it plans to accomplish both a successful open source, as well as commercial offering.”

Read more at: InternetNews

Iona buys open-source SOA company

One analyst said the acquisition was probably a “fire sale.”

“When a company acquires another company’s assets [and not the company as a whole, including its liabilities], you know that the company being acquired was struggling,” said Ron Schmelzer, a senior analyst at ZapThink. “From a technology perspective, they had some good stuff that will add to IONA’s open-source offerings. But as a company, LogicBlaze never really got that far,” he said.

Read more at: InfoWorld

Iona Acquires LogicBlaze for Open-Source SOA

Ronald Schmelzer, an analyst with ZapThink, said, “From a technology perspective, LogicBlaze has some good open-source-based stuff that will add to Iona’s open-source offerings. But, as a company, LogicBlaze never really got that far.”

Indeed, Schmelzer said he believes “Iona saw an opportunity to take on a failing company’s valuable assets as a way of continuing its own momentum. Certainly, LogicBlaze won’t add a ton of new customers, and I don’t think Iona would admit that [Iona] didn’t have a credible open-source offering beforehand, so we have to see this as a momentum and opportunistic acquisition.”

Schmelzer said the deal not only increases Iona’s momentum in the open-source arena–typified by its Celtix open-source Enterprise Service Bus offering–but also allows the company to compete for mind share in a market that is rapidly consolidating. However, the open-source-versus-commercial part of Iona’s strategy is still a bit challenging, Schmelzer added.

“Their next step needs to be a compelling road map for customers and prospects on how they should choose between open-source and commercial offerings; what the Iona value proposition is there, and the revenue stream; and how they plan to cross-sell or up-sell from one to the other,” Schmelzer said.

Read more at: eWeek

JBOSS Building a Hybrid Stack?

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).

Read more at: Linux World

Iona adds repository for SOAs

SOA, or service-oriented architecture, refers to a type of software development in which applications are created by assembling independent, reusable software services. Repository tools are important because they store information about the services’ policies, contracts and dependencies, said Ron Schmelzer, a senior analyst at ZapThink LLC.

Read more at: InfoWorld

Iona enters the SOA registry/repository business

Placing it among the existing players, Jason Bloomberg, senior analyst with ZapThink LLC., said: “What’s most unique about the Iona reg/rep is that it’s at version 1.0, while HP Systinet Registry, webMethods Infravio X-Registry and LogicLibrary Logidex are now all quite mature products. Even the IBM WebSphere Service Registry/Repository, a relative latecomer, has been on the market longer.”

ZapThink’s Bloomberg said, “The Iona entry arguably makes sense for current Artix customers, but there’s nothing in their announcement that would tempt anyone else.”

Read more at: SearchWebServices