Middleware and BI Improvements Ahead

Red Hat, Inc. has launched a series of new projects and partner relationships intended to make its JBoss middleware suite more competitive with offerings from BEA Systems, Inc. and IBM Corp. Elsewhere, SAS Institute, Inc. announced enhancements to its business intelligence offerings.

Focal Points:

• Red Hat is looking to extend the middleware appeal of JBoss' transaction processing capabilities to better compete with BEA's Tuxedo. The new JBoss BlackTie.org project aims to extend the C and C++ compatible transaction capabilities of legacy applications to allow systems to more easily integrate with Java applications managed by JBoss. Red Hat is also working with Hyperic, Inc. to develop a Web software management project called RHW to build out a common service management platform. The platform is intended to be used by both vendors for service oriented architecture (SOA) and other Web 2.0 management initiatives.
• Red Hat also announced the availability of the JBoss Enterprise SOA Platform to help companies manage application and business process integration capabilities using the framework. Specifically, the platform aims deliver better customer experiences and availability, reduce business process errors, and simplify application integration by heavily leveraging automated processes. The company also announced an "Enterprise Acceleration" initiative to encourage corporations to adopt JBoss Enterprise Middleware solutions. A new resource center called the Enterprise Acceleration Center was launched to help with application certification, application migration, and performance tuning and benchmarking.
• SAS has released improvements for its SAS Enterprise Miner, SAS Forecast Server, SAS Text and Miner software to help corporations improve the analytical capabilities of the data stored in their enterprise databases. The enhancements address new and improved capabilities including user interface enhancements, better outlier detection options and filtering, and six new analytical tools and productivity enhancements. New modeling algorithms include gradient boosting, partial least squares, and support vector machines, according to the company.

Experton Group believes Red Hat is positioning itself against the onslaughts of a combined BEA/Oracle machine as well as IBM Corp. and Microsoft Corp. in what is and will be a hotly contested SOA and transaction processing space. SAS remains one of the few independent BI providers and continually needs to provide leading edge BI software to compete with the vendors that are bundling BI software with their other offerings. Experton Group sees Red Hat as having the tougher challenge of the two firms and the new strategy being offered by new executive management is needed but risky. IT executives should approach SOA and Web 2.0 initiatives cautiously and ensure the projects are containable, justified by the business, and supported by non-IT executives that can assist in leveraging these pilots into full scale rollouts.