Prochain Arret Neuchatel

I write this from the Swiss Air Lines business center in Geneva...awaiting my flight back to the US.

I've been in Neuchatel the past few days for the quarterly meeting of the JBoss TBOD (Technical Board of Directors). Sacha Labourey chairs the two days of meetings of the JBoss technical leaders. We covered a wide range of business and technical topics (OpenJDK, Java EE 6, etc., etc.) over the two days. It's a good way to ensure that we synchronize our thoughts once a quarter. And it offers a great chance to generally catch up with folks face to face...during the meetings...after the meetings over food and drink....etc.

Speaking of food and drink, the meeting nicely dovetailed with the annual Neuchatel Wine Festival. It's 3 days of food, drink, and general partying into the wee hours. I took some time on Saturday to wander around the town and found myself at around 1:30 completely famished.

No worries there of course, since every kind of food and drink is right here for the asking. I kept it simple by ordering "la choucroute et une bier".

As I lifted the beer to my lips, I toasted another successful TBOD meeting...and then tucked into my dish.

Mmmmmm....sauer kraut with various sausages and a beer never tasted so good!

Who's the BOSS? JBoss Seam and JBoss Rules, of course

InfoWorld recently awarded the Best Open Source Software for the Enterprise (aka the 2007 InfoWorld Bossies).

Gavin King and the JBoss Seam community were given top honors as the Best Web App Server Framework in the Platforms and Middleware category:
"Seam is a Java EE-based framework that helpfully combines Enterprise Java Beans (EJB) 3.0 and Java Server Faces (JSF), and delivers important new benefits that include handling the thorny problem of stateful page flows, simple construction of CRUD applications, AJAX and Web 2.0 interfaces on server-based applications, reporting enhancements, and an extensive business-rules capability."

And speaking of business-rules capability, Mark Proctor and the Drools/JBoss Rules community were given top honors as the Best Business Rule Management System in the Software Development category:
"Measured by enterprise-grade features including sophisticated tools for developers, graphical interfaces for business analysts, and fast runtime performance, JBoss Drools lags only Fair Isaac's Blaze Advisor and ILOG's JRules. At the current pace of development it will not lag them for long."

Both of these communities have been quickly building out innovative features designed to simplify application development. When used together and along with JBoss jBPM for Business Process and Workflow, the speed with which a robust, AJAX-enabled, business process and rules-driven application with full CRUD capabilities can be created is mind-numbingly impressive.

Anyhow, kudos to the Seam and Drools communities for showing who's the BOSS...the Best Open Source Software.

What's in a Subscription?

So, it's been a busy couple of months of business travel. With lots more to come in September and October.

My travel has mostly focused on meeting with customers and partners to understand their needs, share our strategy, and discuss ways we might be able to help them.

In these discussions, I typically cover our strategic roadmap and development model for the JBoss Enterprise Application Platform and other JBoss Enterprise Middleware products.

Since the Red Hat / JBoss business model is built on selling subscriptions, the discussion leads to the definition of a Subscription.

Put simply, a Subscription is comprised of:

1. Software bits
2. Patches and updates to the bits
3. Support in the use of the bits
4. Legal assurance

While there's much more to say about each bullet point, that's basically the definition in a nutshell.

Since our products are open source, some people associate subscriptions with just support. In my Open Source Business Models: Definition of Support posting, I make the case that our customers need more than just support...which is why we are in the business of selling Subscriptions.