JBossWorld: debrief

Disclosure: I am a shareholder of RedHat. I do not work for RedHat.

I am back from JBoss World. It was a good thing for me to witness what JBoss has become and I wanted to share my raw notes and impressions.

I feel the JBoss division is finally integrated.


Sales
The RHEL-FEDORA model has been implemented and that is a good thing from a sales standpoint. The overlay model of sales is finally being implemented. A lot of attrition and turnover in the sales ranks, but those that have stayed seem to be doing well for themselves and their morale is high due to the proprietary sale of the RHEL/FEDORA model. Customer usage is high. Customers use JBoss heavily, many use multi-products from line-up. "You guys are everywhere, this is the third startup I work at and the default go-to app-server is JBoss". Momemtum in product adoption on the rise.

R&D
Developer ranks are intact. Morale has improved dramatically. Some are truly happy there, some less so, but virtually all developers have stayed so far. Change in CEO seen as a potentially positive thing from the inside, "operations are finally going to be fixed". Delivery of the division from a product standpoint is there, innovation is there. Strong leadership of EE6. Some concerns over the leadership of SUN in EE6 (probably worth another blog). Strong product announcements with SOA and Black-Tie. Weak product announcements with JBoss DNA, doesn't mean anything. Great traction of SOA product, well done to that team. AS5 needs to be finished and certified. Lack of certification is the only big black spot on the product front. Whining about RedHat from developers is mostly over. People laugh over the operational clumsiness or mediocrity and appreciate the good stuff. Still globally under-invested in R&D. "Can you believe they hired two persons for a internal cookbook but won't let me hire for my project?". Some HR priorities seem clueless.

Competition
Competition talk involves BEA/Oracle and Glassfish. Question abound over SUN's role in EE6 and their lack of neutrality given GlassFish. Spring is no longer percieved as a threat/competition, the customers use it and it doesn't affect the JBoss business. IBM is perceived as having failed Geronimo and Websphere CE, internal contradictions at IBM are apparent to most developers. Java's momentum is the talk of town, perception that Java is peaking. Talk for the need for a new language beyond java among elite developers. On the positive clear perception that java has entered golden age of maintenance. The race is over and now we just mint money, which is good from a shareholder standpoint.

Marketing
Extreme turnover in the ranks. Not many old timers left, btw congratulations on organizing JBW pretty much all by yourself, Ms Goldstein, you have outdone yourself. Ranks being replenished, new head of marketing shows promise and is a veteran. Too soon to tell. Red Hat is still groping for a multi-product message. Continued failure to communicate as a multi-product company. Technically vapid marketing fluff like "enterprise acceleration" or "SOA governance" does not constitute multi-product communication. To appear as a multi-product company all that is needed is to TALK ABOUT THE MULTI-PRODUCT LINE UP ****FRONT AND CENTER****. Simple but somehow magically complex for Red Hat to handle. Main marketing problem is 1/ Marketing lack of product definition, defaults to vapid and innocuous messages 2/ PR is still broken.

PR
Serious issues in PR. Perceived loss of press momentum of JBoss under Red Hat, I know where it comes from: not from sales or customers, the sales and usage are increasing: it comes from internal PR. JBoss, the brand and message, are being mismanaged and ultimately squandered. Severe people issues. JBoss PR needs to be rebooted.

Black-Tie, RHQ and SOA PR were botched. BlackTie specifically was both a product announcement, as drop in replacement for Tuxedo, and a defining company statement (we are targeting the enterprise with a OSS Tuxedo/BEA replacement, in production, in maintenance, where the money is with OSS). What a perfect fit! Instead announcement was nowhere on keynotes, was slipped in as a "in other news" announcement reportedly for fear of pissing off Oracle.

I am overall positive, the momentum is here, product and sales are solid. Energy levels are back up. What is broken seems limited to a few individuals and not systemic (e.g. no business model incompatibility). Not everyone is able to make the transition to a multi-product redhat.

Comments

Anonymous said…
Red Hat needs you back, Marc, we need a great strong leader, not an airplane executive! JBoss is dying under the weight of ponderous processes, and overweight corporate staff. We can all feel the loss of momentum, senior management needs to stop stifling creativity, and bring you back!!!
douglas dooley said…
marcf,

Thanks for the update, it seems to me to be the 1st acceptance of the issue of AS5 that makes it tough to defend JBoss these days...Blacktie is great, SOA is fine, jboss.org is fun, but what really matters is a date, a point in time to say JBoss people are not going to complain about Glassfish anymore and actually compete...

there is no evidence, and it is a stale argument that Sun somehow benefits unfairly from Glassfish, the reason it is viable is both Sun's execution and JBoss' drop-of-the-ball...

u know I am a huge fanboy of your former company, saved the planet from proprietary extensions in to perpetuity...but the real competitive front is the Spring guys getting mileage off of saying that JEE5 is dead on arrival, EJB sucks, and they are the 'de-facto standard'...

until JBoss5 emerges from the trenches, i am on shakier ground when i engage the debate...
Anonymous said…
Doug Dooley is right, it's high time Sun began to benefit from the Java revolution they started. It seems to me they're executing well with Glassfish, and good on them for that. How will JBoss respond?
adt43wt342 said…
AS5 **needs** to be certified.

As stated in the blog I am not worried about competitive dynamics as much anymore. No one talked about Spring and as for Glassfish... good for them that they are getting traction. But it is too late. The java train has left the station.
adt43wt342 said…
Anonymous,

I'll bite,

I and many others give the benefit of the doubt to the new CEO. It is not vision or product that are the problem at Red Hat, it is execution and operations. I believe that the transition to a multi-product company was just impossible under the old regime.
I actually believe that a strong operations background is needed at the helm of this company in order to really get it growing.

Additionally, the financial packaging background of Jim at Delta may also come in handy in certain acquisition situations, if you follow my drift.

There I said it all.
Anonymous said…
Marc, it would be really great if you could lead the vision for JBoss AS 6 and the suite around it. I am not from the inside, but followed JBoss for a looong time. The community of users may be growing, but the comunnity of developers is at risk of "fading away". And that's where the momentum should come from.
Anonymous said…
Marc,

Great seeing you at JBW!! I'm still kickin butt and taking names selling JBoss to new customers up here in the mid-west. Thanks again for the opportunity you gave me 2 years ago, I'm doing my best to make ya proud!
adt43wt342 said…
Hey Joe,

yeah seeing you with your customer and talking to the both of you was one of those data points that led me to "sales guys are doing good for themselves".

I am also struck by the more positive cynical attitude of some of the sales guys, they are good they know it and they make money as a consequence. There is a "let the clowns do what they will do, we don't care, attitude". It was a particular smirk from a particular sales man, that tipped me off. That attitude is missing in the dev ranks. The developers, at least some of them still hope Red Hat to be like JBoss was and RedHat is no JBoss. JBoss was a young startup, with the fun parts. Redhat is an young adult company with the particular mix of ackwardness, clumsiness and not really knowing what you are doing that comes with being 21 and struggling with the transition into adulthood.

At JBoss developers were treated like royalty and now they complain that they are called "associates", as if they worked at burger king as one put it. Not all developers are like that, some actually are really happy with their particular situation. JBoss sales guys do not suffer from the same ego problem. They maintain their ego on their own. More resilient. Good for you.
Anonymous said…
what do you think of Sun buying MySQL, why didn't Red Hat get its act in gear?
adt43wt342 said…
Anonymous 2,

what do I think of SUN buying mySQL... good question. I covered that twice on this blog already with a big "blank"... today, I am still puzzled by this acquisition.

I read Matt A's interview of Pony Tail Boy. He was taking a personal jab at me by responding to the question "why will you integrate MySQL better than RHT has integrated JBoss" his first answer is basically "Because, unlike Marc Fleury, Marten Mickos is not an ass". I love you too JS. I would hate to think that SUN passed on acquiring us because I am jackass :).

At this point I have no more comments except to say that
1/ I actually like and respect pony tail boy and could have actually worked for him, but that is past history :)

2/ I put odds on SUN screwing it up. Integration is a tough tough game. Only IBM and Oracle prove savvy at it. SUN has a dismal track record, they have sucked pretty bad at integrating.

Going forward, the most encouraging comment I read in the interview was "we are going to stay out of their way and help when we can". That was pretty insightful. SUN has screwed most acquisitions if not all by letting middle management crush it. Either by hostility, incompetence or indifference. I believe SUN is a different company from when I was there, but it is entirely possible it isn't.

The proof will be in the pudding, if they truly expand mySQL and it transform the perception of SUN as a HW company and over time they grow the revenue of 60M to catch up to 6B then I will start singing kumbaya.

Until then, I draw a blank, go back to the top of the post.
adt43wt342 said…
Oh, and on why RHT didn't buy it... because it couldn't it was too expensive.
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