14 DAY TRIAL // Red Hat announced on Monday that it has entered a definitive agreement to acquire JBoss, provider of open source middleware which competes with IBM's WebSphere product. The price tag has been set at $420 million: $350 million now and another $70 million to be paid upon completion of future performance milestones.
Questions arose as to how IBM will react to the move. Dana Gardner, analyst with Interarbor Solutions suggests that IBM and Novell could offer a similar deal, with Novell's Linux platform, IBM's Websphere and some Eclipse tools. Additionally, IBM might take advantage of the situation, anyway. If more users are encouraged to adopt SOA, Big Blue will be more than happy to provide needed tools and expertise, said Michael Goulde, senior analyst at Forrester Research.
"Customers are already using JBoss to whack IBM and BEA over pricing," commented James Governor, analyst with RedMonk. "If you're a Red Hat customer and a WebSphere customer, you'll probably have a very interesting conversation with your sales reps over the next couple of months."