Johannesburg, 14 Jun 2013
Linux Warehouse, the premier distributor of enterprise open source software for southern Africa and an authorised distributor in southern Africa for Red Hat, today announced the latter's new community resources designed to help enterprises migrate to open source middleware technologies, including a community-driven JBoss Migration Centre and new tooling to ease the process of migrating from proprietary application server technologies to the open source JBoss platform.
As more enterprises develop technology-dependent products and services, interest in robust and reliable middleware continues to grow. These enterprises are reconsidering existing investments in middleware as they look at open hybrid clouds, yet may find themselves unable to proceed as easily as they would like with proprietary middleware solutions, because of "cloud unfriendly" features and practices, including rigid architectures, prohibitive licence structures, and lack of portability. In addition, the technical complexity and mission-critical nature of enterprise applications present numerous migration challenges when the time comes to change platforms.
* JBoss Migration Centre: To this end, Red Hat has created a new JBoss Migration Centre to help enterprises 'get unstuck' and navigate middleware migrations. The new JBoss Migration Centre includes a set of open source migration assessment tools as well as guides and documentation to accelerate the process and reduce the risk of migrating applications to Red Hat JBoss Middleware.
* Windup: One of the first tools available in the JBoss Migration Centre is the Windup project, which can be used to assess and accelerate the process of migrating workloads from proprietary application servers to Red Hat's open source JBoss Enterprise Application Platform. Over time, Red Hat anticipates additional open source contributions from customers and partners will augment the JBoss Migration Centre, expanding its capabilities to a wider range of migration scenarios.
As organisations migrate workloads, they often look to business partners to assist through services engagements. Together with Red Hat, these business partners and customers form an ecosystem that has been effective in achieving successful migrations. Tools found in the JBoss Migration Centre, such as Windup, are entirely open source, freely available, and welcoming of contributions. The centre has been carefully designed to support the needs of both customers and partners that are choosing to move workloads to Red Hat JBoss Middleware by providing tools that help facilitate many of the transition activities.
"Open source offers a level of flexibility and transparency that is tough to match, both as an innovation model and as a development schema," commented Craig Muzilla, vice-president and general manager, Middleware, Red Hat. "It presents an attractive alternative to proprietary solutions that may be holding enterprises back from fully realising the value of these technologies to the business. Tools in the JBoss Migration Centre are meant to help these organisations 'get unstuck' from their proprietary systems by providing migration maps to popular enterprise open source solutions."
"Using the Windup tool, we were able to scan hundreds of applications and obtain objective information on our existing application base," added John Liptak, senior lead architect, Technology and Strategy, CenturyLink. "We have leveraged that information for both planning and detailed development tasks. The tool has proved to be a tremendous asset during our migrations, and we've already set it up internally for continuous use by other department teams that are looking to follow our lead for their own open source migrations."
"We've seen the benefits of establishing a migration practice first hand in terms of modernising and optimising applications and platforms, and, in particular, making them cloud-ready," continued Adam Burden, global managing director, Emerging Technology Innovation, Accenture. "We're pleased to see prolonged investment in this area from Red Hat, and we are prepared to continue our work with new solutions such as JBoss Migration Centre in order to help clients drive enterprise agility, accelerate innovation, reduce costs and improve quality and security."
"Red Hat has demonstrated excellent momentum around its application platform technology over the past several years, which Hurwitz & Associates documented in a recent Red Hat-sponsored research report, titled: 'Benefits of Migration to Modern Middleware Services'," concluded Judith Hurwitz, president and CEO, Hurwitz & Associates. "Making migration resources available to the JBoss Developer community, such as the new JBoss Migration Centre and tools like Windup, can help accelerate the shift toward open source."
For further information, please contact the sales team: tel (011) 795 7950; e-mail sales@linuxwarehouse.co.za.
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