We are in Boston at the Red Hat Summit 2008 at the actually pretty nice Heinz Convention Center and we've got a special guest with us, would you like to introduce yourself? Sure, my name is Aaron Darcy and I'm the Director of Product Line Management for the JBoss Enterprise Application Platform. So what does that mean exactly? Sure, so I manage all the business side of our application platform product and that's kind of our certified application service. It was this week you guys had an announcement about essentially, to put it in my words, running JBoss on EC2. Do you want to give us a brief summary of that? Sure, that's exactly right. We announced the availability of JBoss Enterprise Application Platform with Red Hat Enterprise Linux on Amazon's EC2. So customers today can actually go to our website or Amazon EC2 and buy JBoss Enterprise Application Platform on a monthly and per instance hour basis. So what composes the JBoss Platform? Sure, great question. So as I said, it's our certified application server but it's a lot more than that. We actually integrate over 15 of our JBoss.org projects into our Enterprise Application Platform. So it includes a lot of the common JBoss.org projects such as our application server. We integrate Hibernate, JBoss SIEM for Web 2.0 presentation integration. Clustering, caching, we embed Tomcat as well. And a lot of all your standard Java Enterprise Edition features as well. So what kind of applications or things do you figure people use this for? Yeah, you know, it's interesting. So, you know, we announced the availability of Red Hat Enterprise Linux on the cloud in November of last year. And we've seen a lot of customer interest. I think we tend to deal with a lot of customers that are pushing the envelope with respect to technology and always looking for new things. There's a lot of use cases from kind of a short term and long term basis. So we're seeing customers actually take their peak application workloads and send them over to the cloud and then bring them back in. Oh, right. So there's some sort of cross firewall like stuff going on. So you've got to, you know, customers have to enable that from a networking permission. Sure, sure. So if they have that, then, you know, they can spill over a lot of peak demand. We're seeing, you know, in the animation space, contemplating using the cloud for rendering.
2:01Right. Or think of anything really that has a really large computational task associated with it. And you'd like to get those results back in a short amount of time. We're even seeing some long term use cases. So think of a small startup company wanting to get their online retail website up and running. Right. They don't have that capital to put, to invest in that data center. They don't want to use a traditional hosting provider. Sure. That makes sense. So they can actually get a website up and running on the cloud relatively easily. I've always thought that finding a Java hoster has been sort of a vexing thing financially. And have you sort of compared the traditional prices for Java hosting versus EC2 and seeing what the... Yeah. So we have. I think, you know, it all depends. I mean, what's great about kind of our offering on the cloud is that customers can take their existing JBoss subscriptions or a standard JBoss subscription that we offered before this. Right. And deploy that to the cloud and we'll fully support that on the cloud. But they still have to pay for the EC2. Exactly. Right. Exactly. Right. Or they can get this, for instance, our offering available through us directly. So they can actually get a pre-built image and just fire up an application. Okay. So you guys are reselling EC2 sort of. So yeah. So Amazon's taking care of all the billing. And so whatever else you consume through Amazon, whether it be S3 or other services, you've got kind of one-stop shopping, if you will, similar to the Amazon interface. Sure. But if you want to fire up a JBoss Enterprise application platform image or a Red Hat Enterprise Linux image, you can do that today, literally within, you know, five... If someone was deploying, you know, to this stuff, is there... Are there sort of additional, like, little pieces of software that you use to manage when you decide to go out to the cloud or not? I mean, it seems like something new that you would need to add. Yeah. I think the management element of the cloud, I think, still needs a lot of tackling by a lot of folks. We're working very closely with Amazon in regards to that. If you think about kind of the business that we're in and some of the management tools we provide, so JBoss Operations Network or Red Hat Network, with this offering, you actually get access to Red Hat Network. So you can actually update your images, get certified access to updates and whatnot. But also, we can start to leverage that as our management platform. So if you think about the cloud, the cloud is really no different than a data center deployment.
4:03Sure. It just happens to be somewhere else. Right. So empowering people with the management tools we're already familiar with is an important feature set for us to move forward. And I assume, like you were alluding to earlier, sort of the clustering, starting in JBoss knows how to... Exactly. Knows how to cluster out on EC2 and things like that. Yeah, exactly. As I said, as long as those instances can talk to each other, just like you would in given servers or virtual servers... Right. ...in your traditional data center, then all that capability exists in the cloud. Do you anticipate that as new clouds emerge that you'll go after those as well? Well, you know, it's interesting. I think if you were to... So a lot of the work that we're doing right now in cloud computing kind of falls in three categories. Obviously, making our software available on clouds like Amazon. Right. So that's important to us and we've worked very closely with Amazon to do that. We're seeing a lot of interest from customers to build out their own internal clouds. So helping customers navigate cloud computing, whether that be leveraging cloud computing services like Amazon's or building out their own architectures. Almost think of Webfarm 2.0. Right. I hate to use that. Right, right. But almost that style of architecture, as well as other hosting providers that are looking to offer the same type of service that Amazon does or something a little bit different. But you need enterprise software to be available for that to actually be successful. Just to round up, can you give us like a brief update on JBoss itself? Sure. Like how that's going? Yeah. So it's going fantastic. You know what? We're here at the Red Hat Summit, but we had our JBoss world back in February. It was the best JBoss world we've had to date. We're growing. We're accelerating. We're quite happy with the business side. If you're not aware, we actually made a development split in the way we deliver our enterprise products between the .org open source projects and our enterprise platforms. Right. And every customer I talk to, that's going down very well. I think we take a lot of the uncertainty out of some of the instabilities of open source. You introduced the so-called Red Hat method. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, exactly. And that's going tremendously well. I think we've got a lot of innovation. So most folks traditionally know JBoss as an application server provider. But, you know, in February we also launched our enterprise SOA platform, which includes our ESB and our GBPM workflow tool, as well as our rules management framework for service
6:06integration and orchestration. We've got our data services platform, which is through the MetaMatrix acquisition as well to a lot of customers. They're now relying on us and a lot of our other platforms to build out their infrastructure. Right. I think in middleware especially, and it's obviously evident by the success of Tomcat and other companies out there. Enterprises really want to leverage open source and the power of open source. Well, thanks for taking the time to talk with us. Sure. Thanks so much.