Aug., 12, 2004

By Andreas M. Antonopoulos, Principal Analyst, Nemertes Research

This week’s announcement by RedHat Inc. (NASD:RHAT) of the availability of RedHat Application Server, its open-source application server, highlights the gathering momentum of open-source technologies in the area of enterprise application infrastructure, including application servers, web services, SOA. Together with IBM’s (NYSE:IBM) earlier release of Eclipse, an open-source development platform, and the announcement earlier this month by IBM that it intends to open-source Cloudscape, a lightweight database for Java, this announcement illustrates an increasing willingness of large vendors to embrace open source for development of enterprise applications—dramatically lowering costs for end users and enabling increased application interoperability.

The RedHat Application Server reportedly works with other J2EE 2.0 application servers, is already tested and supported by all major Java Virtual Machines (JVMs) such as the Sun SDK, BEAs JRockit and the IBM JDK, and is receiving strong support from IBM, BEA and Oracle, which intend to integrate their development environments and contribute code to bring Java applications and the development of Service-Oriented Architectures (SOA) to enterprises embracing open source.

The complete Impact Analysis is available to Nemertes clients. For more information, please contact Chris Zimmerman at chris@nemertes.com