Red Hat is aiming to offer an alternative source for messaging middleware and bring the low-latency capabilities of modern trading systems and sophisticated business networks to a broader market.

The open-source giant has introduced Enterprise MRG, a platform it said will allow applications and components to communicate radically faster than is possible with proprietary software available from firms such as IBM and Tibco. Messaging middleware is most used in environments where lowest levels of latency are needed, for example in financial trading systems, but Red Hat believes that it should be more widely deployed across companies seeking more automation, for example across supply chains and complex business processes involving multiple partners.

MRG is the first commercial implementation of the AMQP open messaging protocol and offers guaranteed response times that allow applications and transactions to run at predictable speeds, the firm said. The software also supports grid computing management tools so processing cycles can be scavenged from desktops to speed up operations.

Red Hat plans to release a beta of MRG this week and make the program generally available in the first half of 2008. It will be offered as a separate, cross-platform program at a per-server tariff with pricing to be announced.

“You look at solutions such as Tibco and you see messaging performance at least 100 times faster,” said Scott Crenshaw, Red Hat vice president of Enterprise Linux. “It’s not just for Wall Street trades, it’s for every CIO who needs predictable response times.”

Some agreed that MRG has potential to expand the market.

“The number-one pain point among financial services companies is low-latency architectures,” said William Fellows of analyst firm The 451 Group. “But they want to replicate the experience they have on their trading platforms across their business, not just for equities and derivatives. Longer term, more companies can recreate internally what companies like Amazon.com has done [in automating processes].”

However, others were more cautious.

Neil Ward-Dutton of analyst firm Macehiter Ward-Dutton said, “Red Hat looks to be building something which will eventually stand up, functionally speaking, against what IBM and Tibco can do. But in reality it'll probably take three or more years to reach functional parity with [Tibco] Rendezvous and [IBM] WebSphere MQ. And when it does, the existing apps built on those products are unlikely to be ported over to Red Hat and the existing technologies ditched. Red Hat's market opportunity is in supporting new applications, probably inside a new wave of hosted platforms and applications [where buyers are] keen to look for no- or low-cost middleware solutions.”

Tibco vice president of product strategy Jeff Kristick quipped, “We will be interested to see what happens as the RedHat product matures for enterprise usage -- in about 10 years.”