Bull and JBoss, a division of Red Hat, have announced a worldwide technology and business partnership to accelerate the development and deployment of interoperable Open Source middleware solutions for enterprise Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA). The partnership, which builds on Bull's existing alliance with Red Hat, is JBoss' first strategic partnership in Europe to include Open Source research and development collaboration and demonstrates both companies' leadership and commitment to Open Source software innovation.

The multi-dimensional agreement increases Open Source innovation, interoperability, integration, delivery, and support capabilities. Bull and JBoss will work together in three areas:

• R&D collaboration. Bull becomes a contributor to the JBoss community, following the same collaborative strategy it takes with other communities such as Apache, Eclipse, and the ObjectWeb consortium, which was co-founded by Bull. JBoss projects will benefit from Bull's expertise, especially in security and business process management (BPM). Specifically, Bull engineers will participate in the JBoss jBPM project and lead the BPEL (Business Process Execution Language) project as a starting point.

• System Integration (SI). Bull becomes a strategic SI partner and will add the JBoss Enterprise Middleware Suite (JEMS) to its portfolio of Open Source solutions, known as "Open Energy". Bull's 400-plus Open Source software service and middleware specialists will provide a broad range of system integration services including consulting, application design, and tuning. Bull will deliver JEMS-based solutions on its NovaScale and Escala range of servers as part of the broad range of Open Source solutions it delivers on its platforms. This capacity of delivery will leverage the Bull-Red Hat OEM contract.

• Subscriptions. Bull will resell JBoss Subscriptions, which includes support and access to the JBoss Operations Network (ON), to its customers. Under the agreement, Bull will provide first- and second-level support with Red Hat providing third-level technical support.
As a result, Bull will be the only company in Europe jointly offering innovation, integration, delivery, and support capabilities on JBoss Enterprise Middleware Suite.
As part of the agreement, Red Hat will strengthen its involvement with ObjectWeb, including working closely with Bull on the future development and extension of ObjectWeb, codenamed ObjectWeb v2. In addition, Bull is committed to working on interoperability between the JBoss community and the ObjectWeb consortium.

More information:
• Press release
• Set of Q&As
• Bull’s Open Energy offer
• Bull's vision on Open Source : download "The Open Source revolution" white paper from Bull

In the MCAE (mechanical computer-aided engineering) domain, compute clusters are now a key element in the product life-cycle. Microsoft Corp and Bull have announced the availability of Windows Compute Cluster Server 2003 on Bull NovaScale® R400 clusters, built from high-performance Intel Xeon processor-based servers. The announcement was made at Fluent Forum France, hosted by Fluent Inc, the premier conference in Paris for engineers and managers involved with computer-aided engineering. The partnership unites Microsoft's high-performance computing (HPC) platform with the proven capability of Bull in HPC clusters, creating an easy-to-use, scalable infrastructure, featuring the best price/performance ratio.

Windows Compute Cluster Server 2003 is Microsoft's first software offering designed specifically to run parallel, HPC applications for customers solving complex computations. Windows Compute Cluster Server 2003 accelerates customers' time-to-insight by providing a HPC platform that is simple to deploy, operate and integrate with existing infrastructure and tools. Computer clusters running mechanical computer-aided engineering (MCAE) codes have become an integral part of design and manufacturing facilities.

Leveraging its deep expertise in designing and delivering HPC clusters such as Europe's largest supercomputer at the French Atomic Energy Commission (CEA), Bull complements its traditional offering with Windows Compute Cluster Server 2003 solutions to address the needs of industrial users who need fast and easy turnkey solutions for their MCAE applications.

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