Red Hat Inc. is expected to expand its open-source offerings at LinuxWorld on Tuesday with the launch of a Java application server packaged with its enterprise edition of the Linux operating system, InformationWeek has learned.
The Red Hat application server is expected to be one packaged from the French project, Jonas, sponsored by French industry consortium ObjectWeb. Red Hat joined ObjectWeb last year with the stated goal of contributing to the development of Jonas and then announced a beta test of the Jonas application server to its customers last December. Company spokesmen declined to confirm the launch of a Jonas application server.
"I'm not shaking in my boots," said Marc Fleury, CEO of rival JBoss Inc., maker of an open-source Java application server that's beginning to show up as a commercial competitor.
BEA Systems Inc. will cite a recent IDC report that says its WebLogic application server has a "two-to-one lead over IBM and Oracle in terms of software revenue" in the "all-important Unix-based application server software platform" market in North America, although its lead has been slipping. Linux is the "hottest segment of the market" and BEA outgrew IBM and Oracle there to keep its first-place ranking. IBM's WebSphere leads the application server platform market in Europe. IDC analyst Dennis Byron issued the report last month.
For the first time, JBoss is showing up in IDC's application server report with 1.2% of the market based on revenue. JBoss users don't buy a license the way commercial application-server customers do. They just pay for maintenance, so JBoss implementations are increasing rapidly for the open-source product to show up at all, the report notes. JBoss' revenue grew by 185.7% between 2002 and 2003, Byron says.
