JBoss, Red Hat See European Market as Bellwether

Speaking at the JBoss World Berlin conference here, Werner Knoblich, vice president and general manager of the EMEA (Europe, Middle East and Asia) market for Red Hat, said JBoss momentum is very high in the EMEA region.

Indeed, there were 5 million downloads of JEMS (JBoss Enterprise Middleware Suite) components over the last year and the same period has seen a 240 percent growth in the JBoss partner ecosystem in the region, Knoblich said.

In addition, in 2006 JBoss achieved a year-to-date revenue growth of 42 percent in the EMEA region, with the most deployments being in the financial services sector, followed by the telecom industry and then the government or public sector, Knoblich said.

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Furthermore, 37 percent of all application server users in the EMEA region use the JBoss application server, Knoblich said.

Meanwhile, Red Hat has been working intently to completely integrate the JBoss operation into the parent company following the acquisition announced last April. The company has 300 employees in 22 countries in the EMEA region, Knoblich said.

However, in the area of open-source adoption, Germany is "probably the furthest along in the world, certainly in Europe," Knoblich said.

After all, it was in Germany that early on in the history of Linux "many small Linux companies began pushing Linux-related services, and then SUSE made an impact," Knoblich said. "It also is pushed by the government," both national and local, he said.

The Scandinavian countries have the least Linux adoption, Knoblich said. However, these countries were very early adopters of Unix and are holding tightly onto their Unix systems and applications, he said.

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Moreover, Knoblich said he has seen in the EMEA region that "it's a much more anti-Microsoft world, where if there is a chance to get rid of Microsoft they will."

In addition, for some enterprises and even local governments, the choice to move to open source is a logical move to support technology that has more of a universal, if not local, flavor. "Microsoft is considered a U.S. entity," Knoblich said. And "where Microsoft is [associated with the United States], Linux and Red Hat are not … Linux is open source; Linux is everywhere."

Also, Knoblich said that where Red Hat is leading in the enterprise Linux space and JBoss has a leadership position in the application server space, "We are pulling other companies up. We have inspired many others to follow our business model and we have a large venture capital community spending money to support companies with this business model."

Knoblich said the first JBoss unit to be integrated into his EMEA unit was the sales group. Prior to the Red Hat acquisition, the majority of the JBoss European sales organization was centralized in the United Kingdom, with a small presence in Germany and a few other places. Now JBoss has all the market coverage that Red Hat has, he said.

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