On Monday, IONA Technologies made Celtix, an open source enterprise service bus (ESB), part of its core offerings. Previously, the company had heavily promoted its two commercial product families: Artix, its ESB, and Orbix, its battle-tested CORBA solution. But with yesterday's announcement, Celtix Enterprise becomes a fully marketed and supported IONA product -- the third element in the company's distributed computing portfolio.

An open source experiment matures

Over the past year and a half, Dublin- and Waltham-based IONA has been publicly experimenting with open source software from a development and marketing perspective. In June 2005, the company announced it was developing an open source ESB written in Java and hosted by the ObjectWeb middleware consortium (see this related NRG post). CEO Peter Zotto was quoted in the press release as saying that "easily available ESB technology broadens the range of companies able to apply the advantages of modern SOA solutions" and that "open source software will be a major accelerator for the adoption and evolution of ESB technology."

In edition to driving the adoption of the overall ESB market, the Celtix experiment offered IONA other opportunities, including a chance to:

• Reinvigorate its brand. IONA is best known for its CORBA-based Orbix software. While Orbix solutions continue to solve complex distributed computing challenges, the industry has since moved on from CORBA to a newer concept of distributed computing based on XML, Web services, and service-oriented architecture (SOA) principles. While the Artix brand allowed the company to enter the ESB market, the vendor still was on the outside of the industry trend to support open source offerings. By dedicating code, developer time, and other resources to the Celtix project, IONA had a chance to reestablish its brand as relevant and in touch with today's market.
  
  
• Create relationships with the increasingly critical open source community. For user organizations, the allure of open source is its low or non-existent acquisition cost. But for vendors, the allure of open source is the help that the open source community can provide to software projects in terms of coding, debugging, testing, patching, documenting, and other development activities. The Celtix initiative allowed IONA an opportunity to tap into the community resource pool, and if successful, use that relationship to improve not only Celtix, but Artix, common tools, and the overall IONA brand.
  
  
• Offer an upgrade path from the free Celtix ESB to the commercial Artix offering. The SOA market is based on the concept of incremental adoption, and SOA vendors need a way of getting software into the hands of user organizations at a very low initial cost. Some companies choose to create special trial or project versions of their products. With Celtix, IONA could do more by promoting the free ESB, providing support, and then upselling Celtix customers who need capabilities only found in Artix.
  
  
• Lead, rather than follow, in the open source ESB race. About every imaginable proprietary software product or product category has at least one open source project trying to duplicate the functionality. Rather than watch its competitors or established open source organizations take the lead in the open source ESB space, IONA's Celtix effort would allow the vendor to compete with other projects both in terms of technology and media attention.
  

In some ways, IONA's Celtix initiative was similar to IBM's acquisition of Gluecode Software a month before. The Gluecode offering (built off open source Apache Software Foundation's Geronimo J2EE-compatible application server technology) was later renamed IBM WebSphere Application Server Community Edition and enabled IBM to offer a free, entry-level app server with the goal of both generating service revenue, as well as eventually migrating users to commercial Websphere products. IBM's Gluecode acquisition was in part a reaction to the increasing threat of Jboss (since acquired by Red Hat), which was attracting a following with its own Java-based, free app server technology and open source business model.

Celtix 1.0 arrived in the spring, Celtix Enterprise becomes part of the family this week 

In May, eleven months after the original announcement of Celtix, IONA reported that Celtix 1.0 was available (see this previous NRG post). This week, IONA took another major step forward. As CTO Eric Newcomber noted in his recent blog post, the Celtix Enterprise announcement is "a huge step forward" for the company (interestingly, he also mentioned that he did his first study on open source for the vendor four years ago).

Where Celtix was previously the IONA open source experiment, somewhat buried in its Web marketing, Celtix Enterprise was now a full fledged member of the IONA product suite.

Note: For clarity, moving forward we will call the IONA product "Celtix Enterprise" and the related open source project "ObjectWeb's Celtix."

The Celtix Enterprise proposition

With Celtix Enterprise, IONA hopes to attract the interest of budget-conscious IT shops that are driving forward with SOA adoption. Calling it a "certified open source enterprise service bus," the vendor hopes to interest prospects with:

• A free but robust ESB software solution. As with all open source software, Celtix Enterprise code does not cost anything to download or use. IT can either download the full offering, or they can choose to only download two of its components (Advanced Service Engine and Advanced Messaging). The full offering includes features like JMS routing, routing and messaging, and Eclipse support (click here for more features). How is the new offering different from the open source code? According to the product FAQ: "Celtix Enterprise is an expansion of [ObjectWeb's Celtix 1.0] capabilities coupled with certification, licensing, and professional services."
  
  
• Try and then buy enterprise-class service and support. IONA is offering Celtix Enterprise qualified downloaders 30 days of free support. The vendor hopes that many organizations rolling out Celtix Enterprise-based solutions will then choose to invest in support, training, and consulting. Beyond the limited free support offering, IONA offers three other packages: 1) Developer support -- "guaranteed response times and per-incident pricing"; 2) Standard support -- "unlimited number of incidents based on an annual pricing model"; and 3) Enterprise support -- "24x7 support for mission-critical projects in production ... immediate response times to critical production issues." For more detailed information, visit the relevant support page here.
  
  

Solidifying IONA's product offerings and demonstrating the commercial-open source future

IONA's announcement broadens the vendor's solution portfolio and ends the speculation of what role the Celtix initiative will play in the company's future. It is also another example of how software companies can embrace a hybrid approach -- not at just the underlying code level, but in the product mix -- that blends commercial and open source software. IBM and others have also embraced this approach; increasingly, Microsoft remains the major prominent holdout. We will be able to judge IONA's success with this strategy when it releases its 2007 quarterly earnings.

What yesterday's news does not do is clear up the still muddy ESB market. It's muddy because so many vendors slap the label on any middleware, from retread enterprise application integration (EAI) offerings to new age Web service-centric solutions, and because industry analysts and the tech media can't seem to agree on what an ESB should be.

But for organizations that understand they need new middleware to enable their increasingly service-centric systems, the arrival of Celtix Enterprise provides them with the opportunity to embrace the SOA future with the support of a vendor that has built its reputation on solving complex distributed computing challenges.