1 00:00:01,000 --> 00:00:09,000 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? 2 00:00:09,000 --> 00:00:14,000 Sure, my name is Aaron Darcy and I'm the Director of Product Line Management for the JBoss Enterprise Application Platform. 3 00:00:14,000 --> 00:00:15,000 So what does that mean exactly? 4 00:00:15,000 --> 00:00:21,000 Sure, so I manage all the business side of our application platform product and that's kind of our certified application service. 5 00:00:21,000 --> 00:00:27,000 It was this week you guys had an announcement about essentially, to put it in my words, running JBoss on EC2. 6 00:00:27,000 --> 00:00:29,000 Do you want to give us a brief summary of that? 7 00:00:29,000 --> 00:00:30,000 Sure, that's exactly right. 8 00:00:30,000 --> 00:00:36,000 We announced the availability of JBoss Enterprise Application Platform with Red Hat Enterprise Linux on Amazon's EC2. 9 00:00:36,000 --> 00:00:46,000 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. 10 00:00:46,000 --> 00:00:48,000 So what composes the JBoss Platform? 11 00:00:48,000 --> 00:00:49,000 Sure, great question. 12 00:00:49,000 --> 00:00:53,000 So as I said, it's our certified application server but it's a lot more than that. 13 00:00:53,000 --> 00:00:59,000 We actually integrate over 15 of our JBoss.org projects into our Enterprise Application Platform. 14 00:00:59,000 --> 00:01:03,000 So it includes a lot of the common JBoss.org projects such as our application server. 15 00:01:03,000 --> 00:01:07,000 We integrate Hibernate, JBoss SIEM for Web 2.0 presentation integration. 16 00:01:07,000 --> 00:01:10,000 Clustering, caching, we embed Tomcat as well. 17 00:01:10,000 --> 00:01:14,000 And a lot of all your standard Java Enterprise Edition features as well. 18 00:01:14,000 --> 00:01:18,000 So what kind of applications or things do you figure people use this for? 19 00:01:18,000 --> 00:01:19,000 Yeah, you know, it's interesting. 20 00:01:19,000 --> 00:01:24,000 So, you know, we announced the availability of Red Hat Enterprise Linux on the cloud in November of last year. 21 00:01:24,000 --> 00:01:27,000 And we've seen a lot of customer interest. 22 00:01:27,000 --> 00:01:33,000 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. 23 00:01:33,000 --> 00:01:37,000 There's a lot of use cases from kind of a short term and long term basis. 24 00:01:37,000 --> 00:01:44,000 So we're seeing customers actually take their peak application workloads and send them over to the cloud and then bring them back in. 25 00:01:44,000 --> 00:01:45,000 Oh, right. 26 00:01:45,000 --> 00:01:48,000 So there's some sort of cross firewall like stuff going on. 27 00:01:48,000 --> 00:01:52,000 So you've got to, you know, customers have to enable that from a networking permission. 28 00:01:52,000 --> 00:01:53,000 Sure, sure. 29 00:01:53,000 --> 00:01:56,000 So if they have that, then, you know, they can spill over a lot of peak demand. 30 00:01:56,000 --> 00:02:01,000 We're seeing, you know, in the animation space, contemplating using the cloud for rendering. 31 00:02:01,000 --> 00:02:02,000 Right. 32 00:02:02,000 --> 00:02:07,000 Or think of anything really that has a really large computational task associated with it. 33 00:02:07,000 --> 00:02:10,000 And you'd like to get those results back in a short amount of time. 34 00:02:10,000 --> 00:02:12,000 We're even seeing some long term use cases. 35 00:02:12,000 --> 00:02:16,000 So think of a small startup company wanting to get their online retail website up and running. 36 00:02:16,000 --> 00:02:17,000 Right. 37 00:02:17,000 --> 00:02:19,000 They don't have that capital to put, to invest in that data center. 38 00:02:19,000 --> 00:02:20,000 They don't want to use a traditional hosting provider. 39 00:02:20,000 --> 00:02:21,000 Sure. 40 00:02:21,000 --> 00:02:22,000 That makes sense. 41 00:02:22,000 --> 00:02:23,000 So they can actually get a website up and running on the cloud relatively easily. 42 00:02:23,000 --> 00:02:28,000 I've always thought that finding a Java hoster has been sort of a vexing thing financially. 43 00:02:29,000 --> 00:02:34,000 And have you sort of compared the traditional prices for Java hosting versus EC2 and seeing what the... 44 00:02:34,000 --> 00:02:35,000 Yeah. 45 00:02:35,000 --> 00:02:36,000 So we have. 46 00:02:36,000 --> 00:02:37,000 I think, you know, it all depends. 47 00:02:37,000 --> 00:02:41,000 I mean, what's great about kind of our offering on the cloud is that customers can take their existing 48 00:02:41,000 --> 00:02:44,000 JBoss subscriptions or a standard JBoss subscription that we offered before this. 49 00:02:44,000 --> 00:02:45,000 Right. 50 00:02:45,000 --> 00:02:47,000 And deploy that to the cloud and we'll fully support that on the cloud. 51 00:02:47,000 --> 00:02:49,000 But they still have to pay for the EC2. 52 00:02:49,000 --> 00:02:50,000 Exactly. 53 00:02:50,000 --> 00:02:51,000 Right. 54 00:02:51,000 --> 00:02:52,000 Exactly. 55 00:02:52,000 --> 00:02:53,000 Right. 56 00:02:53,000 --> 00:02:56,000 Or they can get this, for instance, our offering available through us directly. 57 00:02:56,000 --> 00:02:59,000 So they can actually get a pre-built image and just fire up an application. 58 00:02:59,000 --> 00:03:00,000 Okay. 59 00:03:00,000 --> 00:03:02,000 So you guys are reselling EC2 sort of. 60 00:03:02,000 --> 00:03:03,000 So yeah. 61 00:03:03,000 --> 00:03:04,000 So Amazon's taking care of all the billing. 62 00:03:04,000 --> 00:03:08,000 And so whatever else you consume through Amazon, whether it be S3 or other services, you've 63 00:03:08,000 --> 00:03:12,000 got kind of one-stop shopping, if you will, similar to the Amazon interface. 64 00:03:12,000 --> 00:03:13,000 Sure. 65 00:03:13,000 --> 00:03:17,000 But if you want to fire up a JBoss Enterprise application platform image or a Red Hat Enterprise 66 00:03:17,000 --> 00:03:20,000 Linux image, you can do that today, literally within, you know, five... 67 00:03:20,000 --> 00:03:25,000 If someone was deploying, you know, to this stuff, is there... 68 00:03:25,000 --> 00:03:28,000 Are there sort of additional, like, little pieces of software that you use to manage when 69 00:03:28,000 --> 00:03:30,000 you decide to go out to the cloud or not? 70 00:03:30,000 --> 00:03:33,000 I mean, it seems like something new that you would need to add. 71 00:03:33,000 --> 00:03:34,000 Yeah. 72 00:03:34,000 --> 00:03:38,000 I think the management element of the cloud, I think, still needs a lot of tackling by a 73 00:03:38,000 --> 00:03:39,000 lot of folks. 74 00:03:39,000 --> 00:03:41,000 We're working very closely with Amazon in regards to that. 75 00:03:41,000 --> 00:03:45,000 If you think about kind of the business that we're in and some of the management tools we 76 00:03:45,000 --> 00:03:48,000 provide, so JBoss Operations Network or Red Hat Network, with this offering, you actually 77 00:03:48,000 --> 00:03:50,000 get access to Red Hat Network. 78 00:03:50,000 --> 00:03:56,000 So you can actually update your images, get certified access to updates and whatnot. 79 00:03:56,000 --> 00:03:59,000 But also, we can start to leverage that as our management platform. 80 00:03:59,000 --> 00:04:03,000 So if you think about the cloud, the cloud is really no different than a data center deployment. 81 00:04:03,000 --> 00:04:04,000 Sure. 82 00:04:04,000 --> 00:04:05,000 It just happens to be somewhere else. 83 00:04:05,000 --> 00:04:06,000 Right. 84 00:04:06,000 --> 00:04:09,000 So empowering people with the management tools we're already familiar with is an important 85 00:04:09,000 --> 00:04:10,000 feature set for us to move forward. 86 00:04:10,000 --> 00:04:13,000 And I assume, like you were alluding to earlier, sort of the clustering, starting in JBoss knows 87 00:04:13,000 --> 00:04:14,000 how to... 88 00:04:14,000 --> 00:04:15,000 Exactly. 89 00:04:15,000 --> 00:04:17,000 Knows how to cluster out on EC2 and things like that. 90 00:04:17,000 --> 00:04:18,000 Yeah, exactly. 91 00:04:18,000 --> 00:04:21,000 As I said, as long as those instances can talk to each other, just like you would in 92 00:04:21,000 --> 00:04:23,000 given servers or virtual servers... 93 00:04:23,000 --> 00:04:24,000 Right. 94 00:04:24,000 --> 00:04:26,000 ...in your traditional data center, then all that capability exists in the cloud. 95 00:04:26,000 --> 00:04:30,000 Do you anticipate that as new clouds emerge that you'll go after those as well? 96 00:04:30,000 --> 00:04:31,000 Well, you know, it's interesting. 97 00:04:31,000 --> 00:04:32,000 I think if you were to... 98 00:04:32,000 --> 00:04:35,000 So a lot of the work that we're doing right now in cloud computing kind of falls in three 99 00:04:35,000 --> 00:04:36,000 categories. 100 00:04:36,000 --> 00:04:39,000 Obviously, making our software available on clouds like Amazon. 101 00:04:39,000 --> 00:04:40,000 Right. 102 00:04:40,000 --> 00:04:43,000 So that's important to us and we've worked very closely with Amazon to do that. 103 00:04:43,000 --> 00:04:47,000 We're seeing a lot of interest from customers to build out their own internal clouds. 104 00:04:47,000 --> 00:04:51,000 So helping customers navigate cloud computing, whether that be leveraging cloud computing services 105 00:04:51,000 --> 00:04:54,000 like Amazon's or building out their own architectures. 106 00:04:54,000 --> 00:04:56,000 Almost think of Webfarm 2.0. 107 00:04:56,000 --> 00:04:57,000 Right. 108 00:04:57,000 --> 00:04:58,000 I hate to use that. 109 00:04:58,000 --> 00:04:59,000 Right, right. 110 00:04:59,000 --> 00:05:02,000 But almost that style of architecture, as well as other hosting providers that are looking 111 00:05:02,000 --> 00:05:06,000 to offer the same type of service that Amazon does or something a little bit different. 112 00:05:06,000 --> 00:05:10,000 But you need enterprise software to be available for that to actually be successful. 113 00:05:10,000 --> 00:05:13,000 Just to round up, can you give us like a brief update on JBoss itself? 114 00:05:13,000 --> 00:05:14,000 Sure. 115 00:05:14,000 --> 00:05:15,000 Like how that's going? 116 00:05:15,000 --> 00:05:16,000 Yeah. 117 00:05:16,000 --> 00:05:17,000 So it's going fantastic. 118 00:05:17,000 --> 00:05:18,000 You know what? 119 00:05:18,000 --> 00:05:21,000 We're here at the Red Hat Summit, but we had our JBoss world back in February. 120 00:05:21,000 --> 00:05:24,000 It was the best JBoss world we've had to date. 121 00:05:24,000 --> 00:05:25,000 We're growing. 122 00:05:25,000 --> 00:05:26,000 We're accelerating. 123 00:05:26,000 --> 00:05:28,000 We're quite happy with the business side. 124 00:05:28,000 --> 00:05:33,000 If you're not aware, we actually made a development split in the way we deliver our enterprise 125 00:05:33,000 --> 00:05:37,000 products between the .org open source projects and our enterprise platforms. 126 00:05:37,000 --> 00:05:38,000 Right. 127 00:05:38,000 --> 00:05:40,000 And every customer I talk to, that's going down very well. 128 00:05:40,000 --> 00:05:44,000 I think we take a lot of the uncertainty out of some of the instabilities of open source. 129 00:05:44,000 --> 00:05:46,000 You introduced the so-called Red Hat method. 130 00:05:46,000 --> 00:05:47,000 Yeah, exactly. 131 00:05:47,000 --> 00:05:48,000 Yeah, exactly. 132 00:05:48,000 --> 00:05:49,000 And that's going tremendously well. 133 00:05:49,000 --> 00:05:51,000 I think we've got a lot of innovation. 134 00:05:51,000 --> 00:05:55,000 So most folks traditionally know JBoss as an application server provider. 135 00:05:55,000 --> 00:06:00,000 But, you know, in February we also launched our enterprise SOA platform, which includes 136 00:06:00,000 --> 00:06:06,000 our ESB and our GBPM workflow tool, as well as our rules management framework for service 137 00:06:06,000 --> 00:06:07,000 integration and orchestration. 138 00:06:07,000 --> 00:06:12,000 We've got our data services platform, which is through the MetaMatrix acquisition as well 139 00:06:12,000 --> 00:06:13,000 to a lot of customers. 140 00:06:13,000 --> 00:06:17,000 They're now relying on us and a lot of our other platforms to build out their infrastructure. 141 00:06:17,000 --> 00:06:18,000 Right. 142 00:06:18,000 --> 00:06:22,000 I think in middleware especially, and it's obviously evident by the success of Tomcat and other 143 00:06:22,000 --> 00:06:24,000 companies out there. 144 00:06:24,000 --> 00:06:26,000 Enterprises really want to leverage open source and the power of open source. 145 00:06:26,000 --> 00:06:27,000 Well, thanks for taking the time to talk with us. 146 00:06:27,000 --> 00:06:28,000 Sure. 147 00:06:28,000 --> 00:06:28,000 Thanks so much.