Dell Partners with Red Hat to Push JBoss Middleware

Published: August 7, 2007

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

Server maker Dell today announced at the LinuxWorld show in San Francisco that it has worked out a partnership deal with Red Hat that will see Dell push the JBoss middleware stack into its customer base on both Linux and Windows platforms.

Red Hat might have bought JBoss last year to help build up its own software stack above the Linux operating system, but it also acquired one of the few cross-platform, commercially supported middleware stacks in the industry--and also one of the few stacks that is open source. While Sun Microsystems has its Java Application Suite and the ObjectWeb consortium has JOnAS, the fact is that in terms of enterprise-support and features, JBoss is the one that is taking on IBM's WebSphere stack or BEA Systems' WebLogic stack. And even if Microsoft has a well-regarded set of servers that provide middleware functionality, they are only available on the Windows platform, which doesn't do customers who want to support multiple operating systems any good.

That's why Dell is fired up about selling the JBoss software. "With this offering, customers can do either Windows or Linux, which is great from our perspective," explains Judy Chavis, director of software solutions at Dell. And Dell is not preferring one operating system over the other for good reason--JBoss installations are pretty evenly split between Linux and Windows, even after Red Hat bought the company that controlled the stack last year. "I will be happy with a good 50-50 split, but it could go 60-40. We're just not sure yet how it will play out," says Chavis.

Under the agreement between Dell and Red Hat, the server maker will be able to sell the JBoss Enterprise Application Platform, which runs on Linux, Windows, or Unix, as well as the Red Hat Application Stack, which is a bundle of the JBoss on top of the new Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 operating system and the MySQL database. Red Hat and Dell are also going to sell a bundle of Dell PowerEdge servers and RHEL 5 aimed at Web serving and other infrastructure workloads. Dell is selling the JBoss stack, but Red Hat is offering the back-end, level three tech support for the product.

Dell, Red Hat, and Advanced Micro Devices have also announced that they will create a Java solutions center in Austin, Texas, the hometown for both Dell and AMD. This center will be responsible for creating best practices for helping customers to port from Unix, mainframe, and other platforms to a Linux-JBoss or Windows-JBoss combination running on X64 iron.

As far as Red Hat is concerned, the deal with Dell is the result of its plan to expand its JBoss channel. JBoss had a very skinny presence in Europe and none at all in Asia/Pacific before Red Hat acquired it last year, and the deal with Dell extends the reach of JBoss considerably. (Admittedly, Dell is but a piece of that channel expansion puzzle.) According to Mike Evans, vice president for corporate development at Red Hat, RHEL is more broadly distributed than JBoss, in geographic and channel terms, and JBoss will in some cases be pushed out through a different set of channels. In the case of Dell, both RHEL and JBoss can be sold by the same company. The important thing is that Red Hat wants to chase what Evans characterizes as a $5 billion middleware opportunity, and it will employ Dell and anyone else it can to try to take down some of that money.

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