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Seagull, JBoss Sign Strategic Partnership

Seagull Software, a provider of software products for connecting legacy applications to Internet architectures, and JBoss Inc announced a strategic partnership under which Seagull Software will distribute and support the open source JBoss Application Server, expanding the capabilities of the LegaSuite platform. As a JBoss Authorized Service Partner (JASP), Seagull Software can offer JBoss production support and indemnification to customers and will also resell JBoss enterprise-level services.

"JBoss is the rising star in the application server market and Seagull Software is now the single point of contact for our customers who want to build new legacy-aware composite applications on top of the JBoss Application Server," said Don Addington, CEO and president for Seagull Software. "Our LegaSuite products make it easy to service-enable all kinds of legacy applications on platforms such as mainframe, iSeries, Windows and UNIX. Now LegaSuite is integrated with an enterprise-class, open source Java-based application server, delivering even greater productivity and savings."

As the trend toward composite application development in a service-oriented architecture begins to gain traction in the enterprise, composite applications are beginning to bear the weight of supporting more complex and mission-critical business processes. This is driving a growing need to tap into legacy business processes across disparate application silos and incorporate them into new J2EE composite applications that are presented to end users via portals or Web front-ends built on an application server.

"With this partnership, customers benefit from a comprehensive out-of-the-box solution that provides all of the elements needed to deploy robust composite applications comprising information and data from many sources," said Marc Fleury, CEO and president of JBoss Inc. "Through Seagull Software, JBoss has a direct channel to thousands of customers who are looking for fast, cost-effective ways to deliver new J2EE applications that incorporate legacy transactions and data."

As part of the agreement, the presentation integration and programmatic integration modules of Seagull Software's LegaSuite software platform will be certified by JBoss.

"For us this partnership is a bit like opening a new development lab that already has proven, widely adopted products", commented Wico van Helden, CTO for Seagull Software. "We have direct access to JBoss experts and we're experiencing first-hand how the professional open source model can work to accelerate customer projects and cut costs."

Testing is currently underway and Seagull Software expects to begin shipping the JBoss Application Server and providing JBoss support services in late summer.

LegaSuite is standards-based, and will continue to support the leading commercial application servers such as WebSphere Application Server, BEA WebLogic, Oracle 10g and Sun ONE as well as Microsoft IIS in addition to JBoss application server.