Red Hat Pays Big for JBoss

In a brilliant move to own the hearts and wallet of their datacenter customers, Red Hat yesterday announced that it would pay up to $420M for JBoss, the market leader for open source Java. After spending just less than 2 years attempting to build their own Java implementation with JOnAS, Red Hat decided it was time to go buy the leadership position in this critical technology area. With the purchase, Red Hat moves one step closer to the stated strategic goal of "owning the stack" for all infrastructure components their datacenter customers utilize to deploy applications.

What is the next item that Red Hat will add to the shopping cart in this buying spree? Well, several weeks ago Red Hat announced that they were going to create, maintain, and support "certified stacks" for their customers. If they are not successful building these stacks, perhaps they will go buy SpikeSource, mirroring the behavior in the Java space. And, given that a LAMP certified stack also includes PHP and MySQL, maybe Red Hat's next buy will be Zend or MySQL, or maybe Enterprise DB?

In any case, the acquisition is great validation of the value of open source, and it is now more certain than ever that Red Hat is going to be an even bigger force in the datacenter world.