Convincing more business customers that JBoss Enterprise Middleware is secure, tough and reliable enough to run mission-critical corporate applications is the aim of a new technology effort unveiled today by Red Hat's JBoss division.

In an announcement today at the fifth annual JBoss World conference, Craig Muzilla, vice president of Red Hat's middleware business, said a key part of the new Enterprise Acceleration Initiative will be the creation of special resource centers that will allow performance benchmarking, performance tuning, interoperability testing, certification testing and migration testing for corporate customers that are looking at moving to JBoss applications.

"We already have many customers on [JBoss support] subscriptions who are running mission-critical applications on JBoss," he said. "This is to allow customers to gain even more confidence" with the products.

"Hadn't we already done some of this? Yes, we have, but it wasn't really formalized," he said.

At the same time, Muzilla said, there "are customers out there who don't realize that you can run mission-critical business processes on open-source. It's an education process to show them that they can move up beyond the operating system."

Also key to the initiative, he said, is showing new customers that they can move away from "monolithic...expensive and difficult-to-manage...Java [middleware]" that they're already using from other vendors such as Sun Microsystems.

Red Hat and JBoss hope that the new initiative will help increase the company's estimated 30 percent middleware workload market share to about 50 percent by 2015, Muzilla said.

"Fifty percent we think is an achievable, a realistic goal. It may exceed that. We plan on taking a significant market share all across the board," Muzilla said, by highlighting JBoss's wide middleware product portfolio, its enterprise products and the new enterprise resource facility, which has been dubbed its Enterprise Acceleration Center.

"This is an initiative of products, programs and services to accelerate the deployment of JBoss middleware in an enterprise," he said. "The intention is to move the existing successes already in the development community into successes in corporate IT departments."

JBoss runs atop Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Microsoft Windows, and other Linux and Unix operating systems.