There’s always another way to make money from an open-source platform, and offering Platform-as-a-Service looks to be lucrative. No hardware, no installations, no rack of space at a collocation service. If it works for the enterprise and ISV, then it works for Red Hat, one of the latest companies to jump onto the cloud bandwagon.
In late August, the company unveiled what it calls Cloud Foundations, a PaaS based on the JBoss enterprise middleware stack. Red Hat intends Cloud Foundations to simplify the development of new simple Web applications as well as complex transactional applications, and to offer an integration point back to the enterprise data center.
According to Red Hat, the system will let developers build applications in Groovy, GWT, Java EE, POJO, Ruby, Seam, Spring or Struts. The company’s Eclipse-based JBoss Developer Studio will also have plug-ins that allow applications to be deployed directly into a JBoss platform instance within a public or private cloud.
Those JBoss platform instances, the company said, will be available through a variety of public and private clouds, including Amazon EC2, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization, Windows Hyper-V and others. The system will include containers, transactions, messaging, data services, rules, presentation experience and integration services.
“With growing interest in the benefits of cloud computing, enterprises are looking to leverage cloud deployment of existing applications, as well as to develop new applications in the cloud,” said Craig Muzilla, vice president and general manager of the Middleware Business Unit at Red Hat. “We believe that Red Hat PaaS will be ideally suited to deliver the flexibility required by CIOs to respond to business needs with rapid development and deployment, and simplified management.”
