Red Hat Updates JBoss SOA and Business Rules for Decision Making

There is a lot of data buried within enterprises. Communicating and making sense of that data is where an updated set of products from Red Hat’s JBoss middleware division is aiming to make an impact.

Red Hat Wednesday announced the new JBoss Enterprise SOA 5.2, JBoss Enterprise Data Services Boss Enterprise Business Rules Management System (BRMS) platform releases.

Pierre Fricke, director of SOA product line management at Red Hat told, InternetNews.com that the overall goal of the new product releases is to help build intelligent, integrated enterprises.

Part of that integration comes in the SOA 5.2 platform’s support for Red Hat Messaging using the AMPQ standard.

“In the past we’ve supported Java Messaging Services (JMS) out of the box and WebsphereMQ and TibcoEMS,” Fricke said. “The neat thing about AMQP is that it’s a new standard for wire interoperability and high-performance messaging.”

The 1.0 version of the AMQP specification is also being released today. Fricke noted that AMQP is an open standard supported by multiple vendors including Red Hat. The SOA platform is also being expanded with a new release of the JBoss Data Services platform that was last updated in March in of this year.

“In our enterprises we have lots of data scattered about, so information about a customer may be in a relational database, with other pieces in a CRM application,” Fricke said. “If you want to get a holistic view of a customer, for an application to use, you got to connect all the different data sources and rationalize all of it.”

The Data Services Platform is a solution for that data scattering problem and provides data in a way that applications can make use of it. The 5.2 release adds new data sources including Terradata and IBM Netezza data warehouse formats in addition to providing support for JSON data sources.

“We’ve also added tooling to support RESTful data services,” Fricke said. “REST has become a popular way of communicating with data services in the cloud.”

In addition, Red Hat is releasing a new version of its Business Rules Management System (BRMS) with a 5.2 platform release. The BRMS 5.1 release that came out in December of 2010 provided a technology preview of a new Complex Event Processing (CEP) engine, based on the open source Drools Fusion project. CEP looks for patterns within a certain time window or across a set of events, looking for patterns that a business may want to make an active decision on, as the events occur.

In BRMS 5.2, the CEP feature is now fully supported as it has undergone nearly a year of testing, providing stability and performance fixes.

“We’ve unified business rules and CEP in a common product, which makes it easier to do more advanced decision making,” Fricke said. “CEP adds the notion of intelligent decision making to an enterprise.”

Sean Michael Kerner is a senior editor at InternetNews.com, the news service of Internet.com, the network for technology professionals.

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