FAQ
Q: What are you announcing today?
A: IONA Technologies is announcing the latest development in its open source business. Specifically:
The introduction of several new initiatives designed to give customers the products, enterprise-quality services and support programs, and opportunities for community participation required to successfully incorporate open source technology into strategic SOA deployments
The integration of IONA’s open source Celtix™ family of products with that of LogicBlaze’s FUSE
The launch of the FUSE family of open source SOA infrastructure products: FUSE ESB, FUSE Message Broker, FUSE Services Framework, FUSE Mediation Router
The launch of a community (iona.open.com) dedicated to open source SOA, supported by IONA, and led by open source developers from IONA
The availability of enterprise-quality service, support, consulting and training offerings that will be provided by IONA for strategic, performance-demanding computing environments
Q: Why are you announcing this today?
A: This announcement follows IONA’s recent acquisition of LogicBlaze in April 2007 (press release , FAQ) and provides us with an opportunity to publicly outline how we have brought the IONA and LogicBlaze businesses together. Industry analyst findings indicate that by 2010, more than 80% of enterprise investment in infrastructure will be investments in open source.
It’s important that our customers who wish to make these kinds of investments know how we’re moving forward with the open source business, the products we’re offering, how we’re going to support their use of open source technology and how the two pieces (open and closed source) of our overall business fit together.
It’s also important for developers who are using, or thinking about using, FUSE distributions to know that there will be an active community dedicated to helping them be as successful as possible when incorporating these technologies into their over all enterprise systems.
Q: Does this mean that IONA is no longer focused on its commercially licensed Artix and Orbix product lines?
A: No. The availability of open source distributions, supported by IONA, does not mean that we will abandon our more traditional, commercially licensed products. IONA will continue to support and grow those business operations dedicated to commercially licensed products. In fact, we recently announced the release of our Artix5 product and prior to that, the Artix Registry/Repository product. We also continue to advance our Orbix products based on evolving customer requirements.
Since first getting involved in open source, IONA has maintained that there is a convergence happening between open source and SOA, and that much of the innovation in the SOA space is taking place in open source communities such as Apache. We also believe that many of our target customers in the Global 2000 will employ an SOA strategy that calls for the use of both open and closed source technologies.
Our strategy, and with this announcement our mix of products and services, enables us to best meet our customers’ varied technology requirements for SOA deployment.
Q: Doesn’t the FUSE family of open source products compete with your commercial product Artix?
A: No. Our target customers are large, Global 2000 companies with complex, heterogeneous IT environments. Developing and deploying SOA-based systems into these environments will undoubtedly require different technologies that meet specific requirements. These same companies, as we are already seeing in our customer base, will rely on a mix of open and closed source technologies to achieve their SOA objectives.
Q: When would customers deploy Artix? FUSE components?
A: For large IT customer environments, there is a place for Artix and FUSE, as well as our future roadmap products and we fully anticipate that many of our customers will deploy Artix and FUSE side by side.
Artix is designed for deployment in:
Performance demanding, distributed environments, where infrastructure software must run natively on multiple hardware and software platforms including the mainframe (i.e. CICS, IMS, COBOL, C++, etc.)
Where enterprise Quality of Service, such as sophisticated transaction support (i.e. distributed transactions, basic roll back), security integration and high availability are crucial
Where interoperability with multiple transports (i.e. MQSeries, TIB RV, Tux, etc.) is a requirement
FUSE is designed for deployment in:
Performance demanding, distributed Java environments that adhere to widely adopted standards
Organizations where SOAP & XML over HTTP & JMS are the primary required transports and lightweight containers such as Spring and others are being adopted
Instances in which easily accessible and affordable lightweight, embeddable SOA enablement is required, such as use by ISVs, other open source projects or homegrown applications
With both open and closed source SOA infrastructure, customers are looking for an established, trusted vendor able to deliver global, enterprise-level service, support and training. IONA provides the same level of support and warranties for both FUSE and Artix.
Products
Q: What are the products you are introducing?
A: IONA FUSE is a family of advanced, open source SOA infrastructure products closely aligned to Apache Software Foundation projects. IONA FUSE features componentized, standards-based and technology-neutral SOA infrastructure products that work together or independently and allows customers unprecedented flexibility in SOA adoption. The family includes FUSE ESB, based on the Apache ServiceMix project, FUSE Message Broker, based on the Apache ActiveMQ project, FUSE Services Framework, based on the Apache CXF project and FUSE Mediation Router, based on the Apache Camel project.
FUSE Message Broker The FUSE Message Broker is a high performance solution for reliable messaging based on the Apache ActiveMQ project, the leading open source JMS platform for enterprise messaging. The FUSE Message Broker provides high performance, unlimited scalability, and mission-critical reliability for distributed application architectures.
FUSE ESB Based on the Apache ServiceMix project, the FUSE ESB is the integration solution that frees architects from the dependencies among integration technologies that have traditionally locked enterprises into “stacks.” One of the first shipping implementations of the Java Business Integration (JBI) specification, the FUSE ESB supports any JBI-compliant binding for connectivity, and enables any JBI-compliant engine to be integrated into the SOA backplane for message processing.
FUSE Services Framework The FUSE Services Framework is a pluggable service framework based on the Apache CXF project, and it provides the easiest environment available for Java developers to create Web services. The FUSE Services Framework is the only services framework that fully implements the JAX-WS 2.0 specification, radically simplifying the process of exposing existing Java code as a Web service or writing new Web services. The FUSE Services Framework enables developers build high-performance Web services that are scalable, secure, and robust.
FUSE Mediation Router The FUSE Mediation Router is a powerful solution for message routing based on the Camel project at the Apache Software Foundation. The FUSE Mediation Router is a powerful tool for routing and process mediation that combines the ease of basic POJO development with the clarity of the standard Enterprise Integration Patterns.
Q: What is open.iona.com?
A: open.iona.com is a newly launched FUSE community Web site that features user forums and Wikis, tutorials, sample applications, and documentation designed to help users at all stages of their FUSE adoption. Further, the site features a streamlined download process, access to tooling and early access to additional project code.
Q: What happened to Celtix?
A: As we’ve indicated, this announcement represents the integration of IONA and LogicBlaze’s existing open source offerings. For a number of reasons, including brand recognition and the symbolic idea of fusing our two businesses together, we elected to offer our new open source family of products under the FUSE brand.
To that end, we’ve elected to offer our open source products in a manner that better maps to their actual usage/deployment patterns in our customer base.
Q: What specifically happened to Celtix?
A: The components that made up Celtix Enterprise were broken out into individual products offerings better representative of how they were being used to support customer deployments:
We separated out ActiveMQ, which was the JMS provider in Celtix Enterprise, and also part of the earlier LogicBlaze FUSE stack and now offer the FUSE Message Broker
ServiceMix, also part of the earlier FUSE stack and whose container was employed for JBI deployment in Celtix Enterprise, is now included in its entirety as the FUSE ESB
We re-branded the Celtix Advanced Service Engine, based on the Apache CXF project, as the FUSE Services Framework.
Tooling for the Celtix Enterprise distribution will continue to be provided as before, but packaged according to the new product lines
Q: What is the future of Celtix Advanced Messaging? Do you intend to make it a part of the FUSE family?
A: The Celtix Advanced Messaging product was based on the Apache Qpid project and while the Qpid project and the AMQP standard show promise, we chose to postpone our commitment to support them commercially until they gain greater maturity and market traction. The decision is essentially one of focusing our resources on our customers’ current requirements. We will continue to participate in development and advancement of the AMQP standard and the Apache Qpid project and evaluate its future role in the FUSE family.
Q: What about the FUSE stack? What did you do to that?
A: As with Celtix Enterprise, we have focused on the core of what made the FUSE distribution successful, but we have maintained our commitment to a distributed approach to SOA that does not rely on a centralized, monolithic software stack. LogicBlaze didn’t require its customers to deploy the entire FUSE stack. The perception of the LogicBlaze offering as an “SOA stack” overshadowed its capabilities to support an endpoint-based “distributed SOA” approach to deploying SOA. Both ActiveMQ and ServiceMix are extremely well suited for distributed SOA scenarios, and we feel that the new FUSE product offerings better reflects their uniqueness.
Q: But you’re really removing a lot from FUSE, aren’t you?
A: No. We elected to no longer offer those technologies that customers were not deploying. The decision to remove components and capabilities from the FUSE product family was based primarily on our customers’ usage patterns and their stated requirements. Our customers were actively incorporating ActiveMQ and ServiceMix into their SOA environments while leaving other components on the shelf.
In many cases the decision to deploy or not deploy a certain technology was based on what the customer already had deployed. In the end, it made sense to no longer offer the BPEL engine, the UDDI registry, the Jetty Web server, and the Liferay portal.
Q:That sounds like a lot – you don’t have a BPEL engine any more?
A: We don’t provide an open source BPEL engine that we support as a part of the IONA open source product family. We do have a commercially licensed BPEL engine (Artix Orchestration) as an option, and we encourage the use of any JBI-compliant BPEL engine with the FUSE ESB.
Q: So why did you remove the BPEL engine?
A: The Ode BPEL engine that was provided in LogicBlaze FUSE was from the Apache Ode project, so it met our requirements for an open source technology. The lack of comparably good open source tooling for Ode made it a very difficult solution to support.
A number of good engines can be used with FUSE. For customers that require a solid BPEL engine and aren’t happy with the open source options, IONA does provide the Artix Orchestration product, which can be used with the FUSE ESB.
Q: What are your support offerings?
A: IONA offers a complete set of enterprise-quality support offerings for FUSE users to help ensure success with open source SOA deployment. These support offerings address the full range of customer needs including Developer, Standard and Enterprise support, as well as FUSE training programs. FUSE Developer Support provides access to IONA’s 8×5 technical support center, guaranteed response times, and per-incident pricing for development teams getting their systems in production. FUSE Standard Support includes all the features in FUSE Developer Support, plus support for an unlimited number of incidents based on an annual pricing model. This offering is suitable for large projects in development stage and also production environments. With FUSE Enterprise Support, IONA’s technical support center provides 24×7 support for mission-critical projects in production. FUSE Enterprise Support also includes immediate response times to critical production issues, a dedicated Technical Account Manager and packaged binary drops upon request.
Q: How about professional services?
A: IONA’s professional services organization offers FUSE training, architectural consulting and a wide-range of programs to help customers ensure the successful use of FUSE components in their SOA deployments.
Q: Is there anything unique about IONA’s service & support offerings?
A: Absolutely. IONA is one of, if not the only, companies providing service and support for distributed SOA infrastructure that has the breadth and depth (15-year history with SOA) of experience with performance demanding distributed systems.
Q: What makes IONA qualified to offer open source product distributions and the support for them?
A: IONA has been an industry leader in standards-based, distributed computing for more than 15 years. IONA’s customers built the first generation SOA deployments and built them in performance demanding, global IT environments. The company’s heritage, coupled with its active participation in open source projects driving innovation in SOA infrastructure make us uniquely qualified to provide the service and support required by Global 2000 organizations that wish to make open source innovation an integral part of their SOA strategies. The company leads the Eclipse Foundation SOA Tools Platform project and currently more than 25% of our engineers are committers on several open source SOA infrastructure projects.
