JBoss, a division of Red Hat, has introduced JBoss ESB, which rounds out the JBoss Enterprise Middleware Suite (JEMS), an open source platform for service-oriented architecture (SOA). With the addition of JBoss ESB to Red Hat's arsenal, enterprises now have SOA building blocks for modern applications and the ability to run them on a virtualized Linux platform. Red Hat's open source platform is comprised of modular pieces designed to ensure customer choice and flexibility.

An ESB intermediates interactions between enterprise applications, business services, business components, and middleware to integrate and automate business processes. Built on JEMS technology and the Rosetta ESB -- an ESB donated by a longstanding customer in the insurance sector -- JBoss ESB comes with a three-year track record in handling complex integration and real-time events in a mission-critical business environment with 3,000 employees across 40 locations serving two million customers.

"JBoss ESB is the result of a true community effort, from the technology donation that helped accelerate our development timeline to the individual developers who brought their expertise to the project," said Pierre Fricke, director of product management, JBoss. "This release provides a fundamental building block for our SOA integration platform. As an integrated company, Red Hat and JBoss are focused on delivering the leading open source platform for next-generation computing that drives down infrastructure costs for our customers without compromising on value and choice."

JBoss ESB includes other JEMS technologies, such as the JBoss Rules business rules engine for content-based routing and JBossMQ for messaging. Over time, JBoss plans to extend JBoss ESB with additional JEMS products such as the JBoss jBPM business process management and workflow engine, to create a complete business process automation platform. As part of its effort to enable customers and accelerate their path to SOA, JBoss will be looking to partners to extend the ESB with connectors, B2B gateways, SOA governance, and business services. Enterprises can start building on JBoss ESB today, with the assurance of standards-based portability.

"By offering a pluggable platform, Red Hat is making it easier for enterprises to move to flexible, open SOA-based systems with best-of-breed technologies," said Ed Horst, vice president of marketing, AmberPoint. "We support JBoss products and will continue to extend our support for the Red Hat Open Source Architecture platform to benefit customers looking for a proven solution for SOA management and governance."

"Our partnership with JBoss and deepening integration with JEMS help SeeWhy deliver the strongest real-time business intelligence solution for SOA environments," said Charles Nicholls, CEO of SeeWhy Software. "To fully realize the potential of SOA, customers need intelligent processes, as well as the capability to instantly act upon information related to those processes. Close integration with products such as JBoss ESB gives the SeeWhy platform this ability and offers Red Hat customers a BI solution that will enhance their SOA initiatives."

"With their strong track record in Linux and open-source middleware, Red Hat and JBoss are well positioned to accelerate SOA implementations across the entire market. Vyante sees this as a great opportunity and is working to ensure a strong partnership by optimizing our EnvoySOA product for JEMS and JBoss ESB," said Aaron Kopel, CEO, Vyante.

Key features of JBoss ESB 4.0 include: