Marking another step in its evolution to a “normal” company, Red Hat’s JBoss is making noises that it has signed up over 70 channel partners over the past nine months. Not surprisingly, given that Europe tends to be channels driven, the vast majority of JBoss partners are in that region.

And having signed up a few dozen partners, JBoss is unveiling a higher level tier, which it calls the Advanced Partner Program. In so doing, it is mirroring the two-tier program that parent Red hat already offers: there are the partners with the highest certification for technologies, and the rest which act primarily as resellers and low end integrators.

We call this a step to becoming a normal company because of JBoss’s outlaw roots, a tone that was cultivated by founder and enfant terrible Marc Fleury. That’s the guy who always seized the moment whenever there was an open microphone to lampoon the complexity of WebSphere and WebLogic, not to mention what he termed the proprietary open source model of Red Hat, the company that eventually acquired his business. We recall catching him and an associate sneaking through the back door of some LinuxWorld conference some time ago.

But Fleury’s acting would have been hot air except for the fact that JBoss was the first successful Java platform to provide an alternative that was perceived as far less complex (and cheaper) than WebSphere or WebLogic. Although it wasn't part of the LAMP stack (Linux, Apache webserver, MySQL database, and one of the “P” scripting languages: Perl, Python, or PHP), it catered to a reputation of being the nice, digestible appserver that could.

But that was yesterday. Today, JBoss has grown well beyond its appserver roots, and just like the big boys, it’s been building its own stack extending to BPM, ESB, rules management, and over the past nine months, it’s expanded beyond the runtime to building a development stack as well. Furthermore, while its tooling is Eclipse-based, JBoss is hosting it outside the Eclipse community. And with the acquisition by Red Hat, JBoss has gotten into the business of offering certified bundling with, you guessed it, Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

So it shouldn’t be surprising that, with a growing platform of middleware and OS offerings, that JBoss needs integrators. Although being part of Red Hat gives JBoss more corporate critical mass, Red Hat itself does not carry a huge field organization and therefore heavily leverages partners. So it’s not surprising that today, JBoss is running in the same mode.

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