JBoss targets 50 percent market share by 2015, achieves 100 percent developer retention

Red Hat's JBoss division has big plans for the future. Fortunately, it's not squandering its development pool to get there.

JBoss was always an ambitious project and company. It would appear that not much has changed now that JBoss is a division within Red Hat, as Red Hat announced today its intention to push JBoss into 50 percent of enterprise middleware workloads by 2015. This isn't 50 percent of all installed middleware, but rather than half of every new enterprise middleware deployments in 2015 will be JBoss.

That's pretty impressive, even if only aspirational at this point.

Much more interesting to me than this marketing aspiration (as this really is all such a number can be at this point, given that we're eight years away from being able to measure the claim) is the fact that the JBoss development team is still intact. For Red Hat to reach its ambitions, it has to retain good employees that contribute to that vision, and specifically the developers who lead and develop the projects.

During Red Hat's press conference on JBoss today, therefore, I asked if the reported JBoss defections had hurt JBoss' momentum.

Craig Muzilla, vice president of Red Hat's middleware business, was clear that despite some early departures of JBoss employees, mostly from the sales and marketing ranks, the core JBoss development team remains intact and all (or virtually all) of the JBoss developers have stayed with Red Hat. No leading or core engineers from any of the JBoss projects have left, affirmed Sacha Labourey, CTO of the JBoss division.

Muzilla also noted that Red Hat is actively building out its JBoss sales and marketing team.

This is impressive. Marc Fleury left, as did Bob Bickel, Ben Sabrin, and others (to various open-source companies, for the most part). Yet Red Hat has managed to keep the core architects of the JBoss products.

So, even with a JBoss diaspora of talented business executives the JBoss beat goes on....The industry is better for having experienced JBoss people permeating other open-source companies while Red Hat continues to build out the JBoss revolution. Everyone wins.

Except BEA/Oracle/IBM, of course. :-)