Red Hat’s second big migration play: data

First, it was Unix to Linux. Same high performance, much lower price, followed by greater CIO value (through innovation, lower pricing, etc. Now, with the announced acquisition of MetaMatrix, Red Hat is moving to the next big migration of data from legacy applications to an open source architecture.

Funny that: make money by freeing people’s data, rather than locking it in.

Siloed legacy applications hardwired to data sources have created inflexible application infrastructures that prohibit shared corporate IT assets, data reuse, interoperability, and business agility. JBoss Enterprise Middleware offers an open, low-cost, high-value migration foundation for customers to modernize these legacy application infrastructures to service-oriented architectures (SOA). Today’s new developer and enterprise support subscriptions dramatically simplify the use of JBoss Enterprise Middleware for SOA across the application life cycle. When complete, the MetaMatrix acquisition will add a federated data services SOA layer for JBoss Enterprise Middleware that enables data to be exposed as services for integration, workflow, and business process modeling.

It remains to be seen how quickly enterprises will adopt the software under Red Hat’s guidance, but the marketing message behind this is fantastic. Wouldn’t you love to be in the business of unlocking value for enterprises? If you’re a CIO, wouldn’t you like to buy into that story (assuming that there’s substance behind the story)?

This is a great move by Red Hat/JBoss. This, I assume, is just the sort of thing that Fleury would have loved – the chance to use great software to go out and bludgeon competitors who are manacled by their reliance on proprietary lock-in. It makes business so much fun….