Microsoft and JBoss co-operate: commercial realities abound

Wednesday, September 28, 2005 by admin

Yesterday, Microsoft and JBoss announced plans to enhance the integration between Windows Server and the JBoss Enterprise Middleware System. The two companies plan to focus on four key areas: Interoperability – web services; Security – Active Directory; Manageability – management of JEMS using Microsoft Operations Manager; Data – optimisation of SQL Server for use with Hibernate and EJB 3.0.

Much of the press commentary, quite rightly in my opinion, avoids the temptation to pepper their commentary with references to “open source foes”, “adversaries”, “thawing of relationships” and so forth. Instead they focus on the commercial realities of the announcement. A significant proportion (as much as 50% according to Microsoft’s Shared Source lead Jason Matusow) of JBoss customers run the software on Windows. However, I think there is an additional commercial slant to this: IBM. In May, the company announced the acquisition of Gluecode with a clear objective to target the enterprise developer and SMB communities – both key markets for JBoss – and whilst Microsoft and IBM have agreed a truce when it comes to web services they remain fierce adversaries. Far better for both Microsoft and JBoss that companies choose to run JEMS on Windows than Gluecode on Linux.

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