Red Hat Gives SMBs and Local Software Developers Boost to Weather Tough Economic Times

MALAYSIA, 9 December 2008 - Red Hat, the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, today announced it is making available 5,000 subscriptions of JBoss Developer Studio to small and medium businesses (SMBs) and software developers in Asia Pacific on 15 December 2008. The strategic investment, valued at USD500,000, is aimed at boosting the availability of locally developed, affordable software in the region.

JBoss Developer Studio provides a fully integrated and certified open source development environment, giving developers everything they need to build rich Java based applications.

“JBoss Developer Studio is a simple, powerful and easy-to-use solution that enables users to develop and deploy applications quickly to meet business needs. In tough economic times, companies need solutions that drive costs down and improve productivity. The answer lies in the open source software model,” said Daniel Ng, Red Hat’s Asia Pacific Marketing Director. “Open source is a superior model to develop and consume software.”

“As an open source development tool, JBoss Developer Studio leverages the collective collaboration and innovation efforts of the open source community and Red Hat customers. The end result is a powerful solution that undergoes continuous innovation and improvement,” said Ng.

JBoss Developer Studio is available by subscription. Instead of paying for software functionality, users pay a subscription for support, continuous product version upgrades, key updates and very important to developers, productivity enhancements. The subscription model creates a predictable cost structure for companies that does not force them into paying steep upgrade licensing fees common in proprietary software.

“The subscription model is powerful. Users are free to use the software and only pay for the support. Customers are not locked in and Red Hat is compelled to add functionality and value to the software, or the customer stops paying us,” Ng added.

JBoss Developer Studio provides a pre-assembled development environment that includes both tooling and runtime components so that there is no need to cobble one together. It integrates development tools like Eclipse and Eclipse Tooling, which are certified to work together with other components such as Hibernate and JBoss Application Server.