JBoss Inc. last week introduced a program it hopes will entice more companies to use open-source application server software.
Through its new JBoss Migration Program, the Atlanta-based company aims to provide assessments, methodologies and tools to help customers move software from commercial application servers to the open-source JBoss software.
The first iteration of the program targets companies looking to migrate from BEA Systems Inc."s WebLogic application server to JBoss, said Joe McGonnell, director of marketing at JBoss.
The company plans to tailor the program for migrations from IBM"s WebSphere offering in the future, he added.
The JBoss program targets companies like NLG Inc., a Woburn, Mass.-based travel company that plans to migrate a mission-critical application from WebLogic to JBoss over the next 10 months.
Jamie Cash, NLG"s vice president of technology, said he would likely use such a migration program to move the application. Two years ago NLG migrated a legacy green-screen booking reservation system to JBoss, and the company calculated that it saved $1 million in licensing fees by not using a commercial application server, Cash said.
NLG initially had concerns about JBoss" long-term performance, but Cash said the application has performed "extremely well" since its installation. Fears that JBoss would make changes that would require NLG to rework its application have also proved to be unfounded so far, Cash said.
Ahead of the Curve
CitiStreet LLC, a Quincy, Mass.-based benefits provider, tapped JBoss as its application server standard for all new projects more than a year ago, prior to the availability of migration tools, said CIO Barry Strasnick.
The company began a migration from WebLogic to JBoss 18 months ago and has now moved all of its mission-critical applications to the open-source server.
"We had a need to dramatically increase the hardware resources available to our J2EE layer, and do it quickly," Strasnick said. "BEA had what we considered to be excessive licensing costs in order to support these increased resources."
With JBoss, the company has better scalability, availability and support, he added.
Shawn Willett, an analyst at Current Analysis Inc. in Sterling, Virginia, said companies switching from commercial application servers to JBoss usually migrate because of lower licensing costs, especially now that the basic J2EE layer has become a commodity.
However, he noted that commercial application servers still have the edge in terms of high-end features for availability and management.
In related news, a group of vendors, including Infravio Inc., Sonic Software Corp., Iona Technologies PLC and WSO2, next week will announce an incubator project to develop an open-source enterprise service bus as an Apache Software Foundation project.