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We’re at the front-end of that inflection point in our middleware business. JBoss started off as an organic, developer-driven phenomenon. We were used in departmental deployments.

However, in an interview Wednesday with Craig Muzilla, vice president of the Red Hat middleware business line, it became clear that JBoss–which includes all of Red Hat’s middleware product line, including MetaMatrix–has finally come into its own at Red Hat. I had been hearing from different corners of Red Hat, as well as from Red Hat’s competitors, that JBoss has been on a massive growth boom of late–rumors that Muzilla was happy to confirm.

It sounds like an exciting time to be at Red Hat. Its operating systems business continues to thrive, while its middleware business heads into overdrive. Red Hat is putting itself into a position that it could move in a number of different directions (e.g., dramatically building out its middleware business, adding applications, etc.). Success does that for a company.

Additionally, though Red Hat has a very strong channel business, with around 60 percent of our revenue coming through the channel, it quickly became apparent that Red Hat’s existing RHEL channel wasn’t right for selling JBoss. So we’ve beefed up our channel to work better with the type of partners that make sense to middleware, particularly system integrators.

Muzilla: We’re now 26 months past the JBoss acquisition by Red Hat. Initially there were some hiccups, but we are now firing on all cylinders.

Muzilla: Certainly people expect JBoss to be a growth engine for Red Hat. We’ll continue to focus on growing this core mission of Red Hat. As [Red Hat CEO] Jim Whitehurst has stated, we have barely scratched the surface in our infrastructure business. We see a lot of promise in RHEL and JBoss.

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Our strategy is to focus on the application server and the application platform, but at the end of the day we need to have more components so that we have a full reference architecture. Our goal is to offer the best complete package for our customers. In some cases we may not have “The Best ESB” or some other individual component, but in terms of the overall package, we are the best.

Asay: Can you give me an update on Red Hat’s middleware business?

I’m sure this phenomenon isn’t isolated to Red Hat. We’re likely going to see other open-source software go through similar inflection points.

Craig Muzilla,
vice president,
Red Hat

The result? Charlie Peters, our CFO, has disclosed that our middleware business is growing at twice the rate of our traditional RHEL operating system business.

Asay: Fascinating. So just at the point that JBoss becomes old news in the media, it becomes hugely interesting business news to CIOs.

In fact, in recognition of the need for greater understanding of and expertise in systems integration, we acquired Amentra, a leading JBoss systems integrator, earlier this year. Amentra gives us a core competency to be much more solutions driven, which has been a key to our rapidly growing JBoss business.

Asay: What’s your chief competitive weapon as you battle the big ecosystem vendors like Oracle that provide end-to-end software stacks?

Enterprises are now looking at us on a much larger, much more strategic scale. Something like 90 percent of the Fortune 2000 have JBoss somewhere in their organizations. JBoss is being used pretty much everywhere.

It has been a little over two years since Red Hat acquired JBoss. Despite a relaxed public spin, rumors at the time, and for long afterwards, persisted that Red Hat didn’t understand middleware, had botched the integration of the JBoss employees and culture into Red Hat, and worse.

This new architecture means your investment in JBoss is a long term one. Our core architecture is not dependent on any fashionable spec or language du jour: personalities can be plugged in and out, a la carte, you don’t have to make a bet on which API is “the” API you need, and then be locked in one of the few AS implementations that implement such API–possibly relying on weaker core middleware services.

That’s the near-term vision for JBoss Application Server. Our philosophy for our next release is choice and flexibility. If you want to use Spring as a Java framework with JBoss, you will be able to do that. If you want to use our own complete stack, you can do that, too. It’s up to the customer to decide, not us.

While Red Hat initially tried to use its existing RHEL sales force to sell JBoss, we learned that we needed to do some things a little differently with JBoss. So now we have dedicated sales experts for JBoss. We also went through an extensive amount of training for Red Hat’s general sales team and others within Red Hat to ensure we were selling the value of JBoss.

Asay: Given the success of Red Hat in its JBoss middleware business, does this suggest Red Hat should be focusing more there, or even further up the stack?

Muzilla: Exactly. Seven years ago you’d see CIOs awash in a number of different operating systems, but then IT organizations decided to consolidate into just a few systems, and the second alternative to whatever the dominant proprietary product tended to be open source. That strategic platform is RHEL in operating systems, and is becoming JBoss in middleware. Maybe soon it will also be an open-source CRM system, ECM system, etc.

JBoss AS 5.0 is the first release which will give us the ability to cleanly separate those three layers. The JBoss Microcontainer abstracts us from the runtime environment and our core enterprise services have been completely componentized and aspectized so they can be fully leveraged from any higher level framework/API/language.

Muzilla: We have a lot of commerce and transactional applications out there like Travelocity with which we work. We’re strong in hospitality, financial services, government, among others, and are also seeing some interesting point of sale applications. We span horizontally across many industries.

Asay: Are there particular applications–proprietary or otherwise–that JBoss tends to get deployed alongside, similar to how Oracle was the early driver for much of Red Hat’s Linux business?

JBoss is growing at twice the rate of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL). Translation? Rocket, meet bat out of hell.

The big question for Red Hat going forward is how this JBoss success will alter Red Hat’s product priorities going forward. How long will Red Hat be content to be thought of as “that Linux vendor” when an ever-increasing percentage of its revenue derives from middleware?

Muzilla: Value is our primary competitive differentiator. Beyond that, we’re also driving significant innovation. We are technically superior in significant ways to our proprietary competition that they simply can’t match due to their closed-source code or their legacy code constraints. Is BEA rock solid? Sure. But it’s lacking in other attributes–value, flexibility, innovation–and this void is driving customers to look to Red Hat.

Muzilla: For this I’d encourage you to read Sacha Labourey’s blog on the topic. He goes into a lot of detail. A hugely significant value that we’re providing in JBoss 5.0 is the ability to separate the base runtime from the middleware services from the API/programming layer. [Sacha writes:]

Where it will end up is anyone’s guess. But for now, it’s great to see JBoss return to the industry as one of open source’s crown jewels, rather than the wreckage of a failed acquisition.

Asay: What about the near-term product roadmap? Anything in particular that’s coming down the pike soon?

One significant new trend, however, is how we’re being considered within organizations where we’ve long played a relatively minor role. Five to six years ago in our Linux business, there was an inflection point when our RHEL adoption went from technical adoption of Linux to a more strategic decision to take a platform approach to RHEL. We became a platform standard within organizations.

But now what is happening is that these organizations are looking at JBoss as a strategic platform, not simply a one-off. These conversations aren’t about, “Give us support for our small project.” The conversations are now, “If we’re considering using JBoss as a stratetgic platform, how can Red Hat help us with this?” Twenty-four months ago we weren’t having those converstions. Today, we are.

Years later, as Joe Nocera eloquently opines in The New York Times, Microsoft has tethered itself to its Windows operating system and almost certainly lost its way on the Internet as a result:

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“The die is cast,” declared Julius Caesar, anticipating Microsoft’s fateful decision to protect its Windows cash cow at all costs.

The more Microsoft seeks to protect its past (i.e., desktop monopoly and all the revenue that comes with it), the less relevant it will be to the future. Microsoft hopes to straddle the two, and maybe it will succeed. But its desktop anchor may well end up sinking the ship.

Microsoft opted to try to harness the Web to accompany its desktop monopoly, but the Web is too big to serve as handmaiden to any one company’s monopoly. Microsoft needs to learn to serve the Web, not the other way around.

Windows is already dying a death by a thousand cuts. Yes, Microsoft still makes billions by selling pre-installed Windows via computer manufacturers. But ever-so-gradually, the Internet is upending its business model just as surely as it has upended models for the music, television and newspaper businesses….Bill Gates saw this coming many years ago…. But in the subsequent decade-plus, the company has been unable to keep it from happening. Think about it: do you really care anymore which operating system you use?

With so much fairy dust in the air over Apple’s day-early release of the App Store and iTunes 7.7 (for Windows and Mac), it’s easy to get caught up in the excitement. And we are excited. Being the intrepid reviewers we are, we’re taking the unofficial iPhone 2.0 firmware for a ride to test out some of these apps. Be forewarned that the firmware has not yet been Apple-approved for wide release and cannot be vouched for.

Google’s app is a prime example. It opens with a blinking search bar and with the keypad already engaged. Like the optimized Web app version, suggested matches are displayed as the search begins; this time they are listed below the search field. Below the search space is a shortcut bar for seeing the array of Google apps, including Gmail, Maps, Docs, and Reader. These icons are themselves quick links for launching the Web-optimized versions of Gmail and clan.

Catch the most recent news about the iPhone 3G and App Store.

The app does save a fraction of time in bypassing
Safari’s initial loading of the iPhone-optimized page and works without a hitch.

More than 500 applications are already clustered in the App Store, many of them tiny apps and widgets that have been custom-built to run natively on the upgraded
iPhone firmware. Most of these early entrants are nearly identical to the iPhone-optimized versions previously released by publishers to work with the iPhone Classic.

The site launched discussion forums earlier this year.

Josephson is replacing co-founder Stephen Berlin Johnson as CEO. Johnson, who made a name for himself before Outside.in as the author of the book Everything Bad Is Good For You, will remain chairman of the board.

Outside.in, a New York-based company that aggregates news and blog discussion around towns and neighborhoods, said Tuesday it has raised $3 million in venture funding and hired a new CEO, former About.com general manager Mark Josephson.

The new funding, which brings Outside.in’s total capital raised to $5.4 million, comes from existing investors Union Square Ventures, Milestone Venture Partners, Betaworks, and a number of angel investors led by George Crowley. A new investor, the New York City Investment Fund, also joined the round. Outside.in said it plans to use the cash infusion to focus on developing and expanding its technology.

Typically, small-wind turbines such as Southwest Windpower’s 1.9-kilowatt Skystream, are best suited for homes with a substantial amount of land.

Mariah Power says its Windspire vertical-axis wind turbine is now commercially available, after having passed performance tests.

(Credit:
Mariah Power)

Mariah Power said the Windspire is aimed at residential customers in urban, suburban, and rural areas. It has already been installed in a handful of U.S. locations.

“(Its) efficiency is on par with most propeller-based wind turbines, but it is priced much lower. It is also much quieter because the rotor glides through the air at only a third the speed of propeller blades, and it can capture wind instantly from any direction,” Mariah Power CEO Mike Hess said in a statement.

The Windspire costs $4,995, which includes the inverter, pole, and other equipment.

The Windspire vertical-axis wind turbine

The Windspire produces about 1.2 kilowatts, or 2,000 kilowatt-hours, per year, according to Mariah’s brochure. It works best in 12 mph average winds or higher, and it generally requires half an acre of land, the company said. It’s 30 feet high and has a 2-foot radius.

The most immediate question is, with Windows XP moving off the stage, just where is
Windows Vista?

The point raised in the Times piece is an important one, though. With Linux-based computers starting to make inroads at the low end, and Apple continuing to gain share at the high end, can Microsoft really afford to do business as usual?

However, businesses, which get to choose which operating system they run, have overwhelmingly stuck with XP. Just a tiny fraction of corporate machines are running Vista, with some companies not planning any companywide Vista deployment at all.

At the “D: All Things Digital” conference, Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer showed off one aspect of Windows 7: its ability to use multitouch input to enable the same kinds of gestures found in Apple’s
iPhone or Microsoft’s Surface computer.

What do you think?

So, rather than rehash things (though you can click here for a recap), I thought I would take a look at the Windows landscape.

The mere fact that Microsoft will stop widespread sale of Windows XP at the end of the day has been a topic here and elsewhere for months.

Windows XP remains popular with consumers as well. So, if businesses and consumers all like XP, why on earth would Microsoft stop selling it?

There are a couple of reasons. For one, XP is now seven years old. Even with a major security enhancement (XP Service Pack 2), the company benefits from shifting things to the more secure Windows Vista.

It appears to me, anyway, that making major changes to Windows has become an increasingly difficult proposition. Perhaps, at some point, Microsoft will have to consider what Apple has done three times with the Macintosh–make major changes under the hood, and use some sort of compatibility layer to maintain its ties to the past.

After waiting as long as it could, Microsoft has also started talking about what comes after Vista. In an exclusive interview with CNET News.com last month, development head Steven Sinofsky said Windows 7 will use the same drivers as Vista and largely aim to preserve compatibility rather than introduce major changes, as Vista did.

It is also critical for Microsoft to build the install base of Vista as quickly as it can. That’s because developers won’t really start building applications that are Vista-dependent until it occupies a large percentage of machines in active use. Even with 140 million Vista copies sold, there are still extremely few programs that really harness the features of Vista.

Steve Ballmer has vowed that it will never again be five years between Windows releases. I think it is important to note, though, that even assuming no delays in Windows 7, it will be three years between its release and that of Vista–and that’s for a release that doesn’t make significant changes under the hood.

The New York Times posted an interesting piece on this subject over the weekend. It points to a number of projects inside Microsoft suggesting that it, too, is thinking about other operating-system approaches.

On the plus side, the newer operating system has sold 140 million copies, according to Microsoft. But, as I’ve been saying for some time, that is largely a factor of how many people have wanted a new PC in the past 18 months, as opposed to an indicator of pure demand.

They are things that News.com has covered in the past, ranging from Microsoft Research’s Singularity project to the slimmed-down MinWin kernel that the Windows team developed but apparently is not using in Windows 7.

Some argue, though, that it is time to stop slapping new paint on top of Windows, instead rebuilding it from the ground up. Although there is an enormous and unmatched number of programs written for the operating system, preserving all those decades of compatibility is a crutch that has made it harder and harder to innovate, or even update the software.

By now, YouTube and parent company Google should be expert at handling international crises. Iran, Pakistan, Turkey, and Thailand are among the countries that have cut off access to the Web’s largest video site. Most of the countries have eventually brought it back.

“YouTube has been blocked in China,” Google said in a statement. “We don’t know the reason for the blockage, and we’re working to restore access to our users in China.”

The Chinese government has apparently moved to block YouTube once again.

A year ago, China blocked YouTube in an apparent attempt to prevent the outside world from anti-government protesters clashing with police inside Tibet. China eventually unblocked YouTube.

A Chinese official was asked about the ban during a press conference on Tuesday and said the “Chinese government has taken up management of the network according to the laws,” the Journal reported.

The Wall Street Journal is reporting that the government began blocking the site slowly over the past 24 hours. Quoting a Google spokesman, the Journal reported that the company has not been given a reason for the ban.

Update at 10:20 p.m. PDT, Sunday, March 15: Silicon Alley Insider is reporting that AT&T will add wireless capacity in downtown Austin to deal with the “unprecedented” demand.

Oddly, that didn’t mean people inside the convention center weren’t able to Twitter or IM or use the Web on their iPhones, or their
iPod Touches. That’s because SXSW really got its act together this year when it came to Wi-Fi. I’ve been to a ton of technology conferences over the last few years, including three previous SXSW gatherings, and I’ve never seen a stronger, more consistent Wi-Fi setup.

Still, people seemed to be able to communicate with their friends anyway. Among what is probably the most accomplished group of interactive media professionals in the world, that shouldn’t be surprising. But the grumbling about AT&T could still be heard everywhere you went.

AUSTIN, Texas–If there’s one thing that’s been made clear after two full days of the South by Southwest (SXSW) conference here, it’s that AT&T clearly didn’t get its network up to speed for the throngs toting iPhones around.

You could hear it being talked about everywhere: it was nearly impossible to call anyone inside the Austin Convention Center because the cell service was so poor. And because it seemed like nearly everyone at the conference has an
iPhone, that meant that very few phone calls were going through.

But AT&T’s network has not been nearly as impressive, and that’s a shame. I suppose there’s a reason, but it would seem logical that the company could have put in the effort to ensure that the thousands and thousands of people at SXSW–which may constitute the highest concentration of iPhone users anywhere on Earth–could get good cell service. Alas, that wasn’t the case.

Even in Saturday’s SXSW Interactive festival keynote address by Zappos.com CEO Tony Hsieh, with about 2,000 people in the room, the Wi-Fi service was strong. Very impressive.