Progress Software yesterday spun out its FuseSource division as a wholly owned subsidiary, in a move the company said is designed to better service customers using the open-source product line focused on integration and messaging.
Progress inherited the Fuse products when it acquired Iona Software in 2008, and the Fuse business experienced 130% growth in 2009 over 2008, according to Larry Alston, president of FuseSource. Alston was general manager of the Fuse division at Iona.
“The FuseSource business is different than the rest of Progress,” he said. “The subscriptions are at a lower price point.”
Subscriptions to the software (Fuse Services Framework, Fuse Message Broker, Fuse Mediation Router and Fuse ESB) provide users with installers, guides and tutorials, a management console, and influence over the product road maps via access to project leads and consultants, Alston said.
The FuseSource software is built on Apache Foundation projects. Fuse Services Framework is based on the CXF project, enabling development and deployment of Web services that enable applications to share information and functionality, he explained.
Fuse Message Broker, based on Apache ActiveMQ, is a Java message broker for communication between applications and service components. Fuse Mediation Router is based on the Camel project, which enables the implementation of integration patterns. Fuse ESB, the enterprise service bus, is based on Apache ServiceMix to support enterprise integration.
“This is not unlike what JBoss or Red Hat or MySQL did” in terms of commercializing open-source projects, Alston said. “It’s infrastructure software that’s used in a broad set of projects. We sell subscriptions at a fraction of the cost of enterprise software.”
The major driver for FuseSource subscriptions is cost, while running a close second is vendor independence, he said. “This is for organizations that need help. Perhaps they have a lot of stores, or need to tie endpoints into a single infrastructure. It’s not a single departmental app. This is for industries you wouldn’t think are early adopters of technology, like retail, which views all this as a cost center. They want something that works, is cheap, and can be put into the hands of IT people who aren’t sophisticated engineers.”
The company also announced the creation of The Fuse Forge, where developers can come together to create integration projects. According to its website, The Fuse Forge is a place where developers can focus on their applications without concerning themselves with the development infrastructure. There are already more than 50 projects in The Fuse Forge.
