It's so nice to be right...
Anybody that's paid any attention to IONA over the past 12-18 months has heard us say, in one form or another, that the company is well positioned at the forefront of two of the trends driving the IT industry -- open source and SOA. We've also stressed that much of the innovation that will advance SOA is taking place in open source communities such as Apache and others. This is key to why IONA is involved in open source, including our Celtix offering and the recent acquisition of LogicBlaze.
Granted, nearly every PR person I know will admit to having drunk the Kool-Aid at some point in their career. It's almost a prerequisite. That's why it's so satisfying when the stuff you've been selling has significantly more than a grain of truth to it. Recently, Joe McKendrick, who blogs over at ZDNet, called attention to a survey conducted by Forrester Research and underwritten by Unisys. The interview is based on interviews with more than 500 IT decision makers and the results bear out what we've been saying for quite a while. In fact,
57 percent of the respondents characterized open source as important or very important for facilitating the migration to a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA). SOA can permit those enterprises both to deploy new generations of applications more efficiently and integrate new services with those provided by legacy applications, helping to preserve the value of their long-term investment in IT. According to Forrester, open source software's support for open standards noted as a key attribute by 78 percent of the respondents was a major factor driving their view of its value for SOA next-generation enterprise architectures.