Analyst: Sun positioning to battle Red Hat JBoss for emerging SOA market

Much has been made of Sun's purchase of MySQL last week for $1 billion, mainly from the perspective of its apparent strategy to corner much of the open source market.

However, Forrester's Jim Kobelius sees another gem in the whole deal -- Sun is acquiring a strong product for delivering service-oriented architecture capabilities.

TechTarget's Rich Seeley spoke to Jim a few days ago, who noted that beyond the obvious data services MySQL can facilitate, Sun could move to provide "a comprehensive open source SOA offering built around its Sun Java Enterprise System including the Sun Java Composite Application Platform Suite (JavaCAPS) platform based on its acquisition two-years ago of SeeBeyond."

Jim also said that this could pit Sun and Red Hat JBoss in direct competition for the newly emerging sweet spot of the SOA market -- the small to medium size business sector, which is more likely to buy into commoditized and open-source solutions, not pricey high-end SOA suites. This is where the real action will be for SOA in 2008 and beyond.

As Jim puts it:

"As regards its drive to become the leading open-source SOA vendor, Sun is going head-to-head with Red Hat, which, of course, has the growing JBoss Enterprise Middleware, SOA platform/middleware suite. In 2007, Red Hat entered the data services market by acquiring closed-source enterprise information integration/data federation vendor MetaMatrix, then open-sourcing MetaMatrix's offerings, and then adding them to the JBoss Enterprise Middleware suite. In 2008, Sun is likely to follow Red Hat's lead in this regard."