"The Apache Software Foundation is expected to launch on Monday an open-source integration server project, part of a bigger effort to create a full suite of Web services infrastructure software."
Building upon the Apache project is a natural extension of web services. As Apache is the market leader on the web (63% of the total market, this will drive further adaption of Apache in the enterprise by moving up the value chain by commoditizing previously valuable parts of the software spectrum.
"Chappell said that the Web services "intermediation" capabilities of Synapse are not directly competitive with commercial integration products, which offer more features.
"This will provide the architectural components that could be used in the broader scope of an ESB or be used in Web services management products," Chappell said. "
This is the beginning of the end for typical middleware companies. These are companies like Tibco, SeeBeyond etc. Why? While the commercial products offer "more features" those features are largely unused. CIOs want a unified look on their data across disparate systems. By offering that functionality at a significantly lower price point (free beer, free speech), they will lose the lower end of the market first. Eventually the feature set of Synapse will be sufficient to allow them to be used where a typical Application Integration software package maybe used.
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