Professional open source vendor JBoss has repackaged its migration services offering in a bid to entice more companies to move away from proprietary software competitors.
The open source vendor is standardizing the migration path away from competing,
commercial app server vendors.
The new service offering provides a standardized assessment and implementation methodology for JBoss Application Server, the popular open source program that company officials said has been downloaded 6 million times.
Officials at Atlanta-based JBoss said the new JBoss Migration Program is divided into three parts: migration assessment, to provide an analysis of the corporate environment and the requirements to move; migration implementation, handled either by the IT staff, JBoss consultants or certified systems integrators (SI); and professional support, to help with configuration help, indemnification and software updates.
The company intends to extend the migration service to the rest of its JBoss Enterprise Middleware System (JEMS) software stack in the future but is first targeting the application server to start out the migration program.
“We want to build out the capability to migrate out from specific commercial application servers and their specific versions over to JBoss,” said Katie Poplin, JBoss marketing manager. “That’s a priority for us right now, to make this as efficient and effective as possible.”
The service is available as part of JBoss’ professional support services or through a group of certified SIs who have signed onto the program. Unisys, Cap Gemini, and HP head the list of SIs already participating in the re-packaged offering.
In all, JBoss has 52 certified systems integrators through its partner program. To join, Poplin said, they need to pay a license to provide the automated service and gain additional training. The migration pieces have been in place and available for some time on a case-by-case basis, she said, but not standardized.
JBoss is in fierce competition with IBM and BEA Systems for market share in the application server space.
As far back as January 2003, JBoss, which sells paid support services on top of free software offerings, has been offering a port from the BEA WebLogic Application Server to JBoss Application Server.
While popular because it is a free download, bypassing the up-front licensing required by IBM and BEA, JBoss didn’t really gain full enterprise credentials for its application server until it was certified through Sun Microsystems’ J2EE Compatibility Suite in July 2004.
This article was originally published on Internetnews.com.