In an effort to scale middleware from its $420 million JBoss buyout upward to the enterprise, Red Hat this week released its JBoss Operations Network (JBoss ON) 2.0 management platform for applications running on Linux and other clients.

First announced earlier this year as part of Red Hat's Enterprise Acceleration initiative, JBoss ON 2.0 is being enthusiastically embraced by some developers.

"Over a year of hard work finally fell into place," said Meiko W. Rupp, a member of the development team at JBoss.org. "This is a great release."

Made generally available during this week's JavaOne conference, JBoss ON 2.0 is designed for managing cross-platform application development, testing, deployment and monitoring. Its modular architecture includes components for inventory, administration, and software updates, plus an optional monitoring module.

Although some developers find that the JBoss ON Software Update feature works in a similar way to Microsoft's Windows Update service, the feature is used for distributing patches and other updates to JBoss Enterprise Platform software.

But the inventory module enables cataloging of IT assets spanning Windows, Linux, Sun Solaris, HP-UX, and IBM AIX, along with a range of middleware services and servers.

The optional monitoring module supports JBoss Enterprise Management System (JEMS)-based applications, along with Windows, Linux and Unix operating systems and Linux-based Apache servers.

Red Hat, the leading Linux distributor in the US, has worked with enterprise customers that include the Federal Aviation Administration, Amazon.com, the McKesson health care services and technology firm, and the global call center operation SITEL, to name a few. But it also competes hard in the enterprise arena against Novell, a Linux distributor that has forged an extensive and ever widening interoperability deal with Microsoft.