The last week at Sun Microsystems office in London, I had the opportunity to discuss with people working on Open ESB. It's always a pleasure to visit Sun’s people. They're always affable, thoughtful and the coffee not so bad.

During the first part of our meeting we exchange our points of view about JBI, Open ESB and the community and how our customers and prospect comprehend the product. It’s was not simple courtesies exchange but we discuss honestly about Open ESB difficulties.

During the second part of the meeting, we discussed about the new features and Sun’s marketing decisions about Open ESB. I am happy that some of our claims have been agreed by Sun. Let’s start by the most important:

From November a professional support for Open ESB will be proposed by Sun. This is very good news that will give reliability and confident to our customer.

Further detail on Sun support

Three support levels will be proposed with the 4 Open ESB based products defined by Sun Marketing. I report in this blog the products names and features detailed during our meeting but of course, they can be changed by Sun’s marketing at any time. But I think that finally this slicing will remain the same.

I describe bellow the four version proposed by SUN

1. Open ESB: Open ESB is the community which contains all the open source components and is part of the wider GlassFish community. The current Open ESB download includes most of the components and GlassFish, NetBeans bundle. Anyone can access the source for the core runtime from Open ESB. Open ESB is not just about GlassFish - the JBI core can run in WebSphere, JBoss or in Java SE (i.e. bare JVM). Sun will not provide support at this level. Support is provided by the community.

2. GlassFish ESB: GlassFish ESB is a binary distribution only of a supported set of components running in GlassFish and design time NetBeans tooling with the required add-ons pre-installed (e.g. binding wizard, custom encoders, XSLT / BPEL editor etc...). It includes a selection of stable service engines (Java EE, BPEL, XSLT, Data Mashup) and binding components (HTTP, FTP, FILE, JMS, Database, LDAP) designed and developed by Sun. GlassFish ESB will be downloadable Buying a license, you will get standard support, patch and knowledge database. This product aims at small and departmental applications since Clustering is not provided nor supported at this level. It can be found on https://open-esb.dev.java.net/glassfishesb

3. ESB suite: ESB suite is the competitor of IBM, Oracle-BEA ESB product. Designed for Enterprise applications. It supports Clustering, be packaged with Enterprise adaptor (mainframe, software package…). Premium services will proposed with this version (Top support, knowledge database, patch …). ESB Suite will be a strong competitor to legacy ESB Suite. It can be found on http://www.sun.com/software/javaenterprisesystem/javacaps/esb_suite.jsp

4. Java CAPS: Java CAPS is the well known product that includes the ESB suite but also many other suites (Financial...). Java CAPS also includes MDM Suite which has an open source presence at Project Mural (https://mural.dev.java.net/) Further details on Java CAPS could be found on
http://www.sun.com/software/javaenterprisesystem/javacaps/index.jsp

Once again, I would like to thank again Sun Team (Louis http://blogs.sun.com/polyblog , Mike http://blogs.sun.com/mikesblog/) for their real motivation for Open-ESB products, their dedication to the community and receptivity to our suggestions.

So what a benefit for ESB community?

The best consequence of this announcement is that we will able to propose professional support to our customers and prospects. As a result, Open-ESB will increase its creditability towards the executive and management. Now Open-ESB is in position to compete with other ESB Suites

At Pymma we think that it’s a time for new opportunities and good business with Open ESB.