Professional open source vendor JBoss has repackaged its migration service
offering in a bid to entice more companies to move away from proprietary
software competitors.
The new service offering provides a standardized assessment and
implementation methodology for JBoss Application Server, the popular open
source program that company officials said has been downloaded 6 million
times.
Officials at Atlanta-based JBoss said the new JBoss Migration Program is
divided into three parts: migration assessment, to provide an analysis of
the corporate environment and the requirements to move; migration
implementation, handled either by the IT staff, JBoss consultants or
certified systems integrators (SI); and professional support, to help with
configuration help, indemnification and software updates.
The company intends to extend the migration service to the rest of its JBoss
Enterprise Middleware System (JEMS) software stack in the future but is
first targeting the application server to start out the migration program.
“We want to build out the capability to migrate out from specific commercial
application servers and their specific versions over to JBoss,” said Katie
Poplin, JBoss marketing manager. “That’s a priority for us right now, to
make this as efficient and effective as possible.”
The service is available as part of JBoss’ professional support services or
through a group of certified SIs who have signed onto the program. Unisys
, Cap Gemini and HP
head the list of SIs
already participating in the re-packaged offering.
In all, JBoss has 52 certified systems integrators through its partner
program. To join, Poplin said, they need to pay a license to provide the
automated service and gain additional training. The migration pieces have
been in place and available for some time on a case-by-case basis, she said,
but not standardized.
JBoss is in fierce competition with IBM and BEA Systems
for market share in the application server space.
As far back as January 2003, JBoss, which sells paid support services on top
of free software offerings, has been offering a port
from the BEA WebLogic Application Server to JBoss Application Server.
While popular because it is a free download, bypassing the up-front
licensing required by IBM and BEA, JBoss didn’t really gain full enterprise
credentials for its application server until it was certified through Sun Microsystems’ J2EE
Compatibility Suite in July 2004.