The First Hit's Free, Baby

IONA today announced its intention to launch an open-source ESB (Enterprise Service Bus) project. The ObjectWeb open-source middleware consortium will host the project, which will be known as Celtix.Celtix will be based on IONA's existing ESB product, Artix, and will support a bevy of standards including: - JBI (Java Business Integration)- WS-RM (Web Services Reliable Messaging)- JMS (Java Message Services)- SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol)- POJO (Plain Old Java Objects)

We found it amusing that at least one industry analyst was quoted by several publications as saying, "I'm not really quite sure how this is going to work for Iona."

The first hit's free, baby. It's a gateway ESB into the harder, more serious and scalable implementations offered by IONA with its core Artix product. It's not any different than IBM's strategy of buying up Gluecode and offering up its application server for free with the hopes of gaining new converts to WebSphere.Those that don't graduate to the harder hitting products can always be hit up for the cost professional services. Either way, it's a new revenue stream for IONA, which is what they're really after.