With more than four million downloads since its inception, JBoss is ready for prime time. What better time, then, to announce a strategic alliance with integration specialists IONA Technologies?

What the JBoss Group gets out of such a pact is the acceleration of the adoption of the JBoss application server at a time when open source is becoming an increasingly attractive option for enterprise customers. What IONA gets is the opportunity to forge new enterprise-level relationships within those organizations. As the IONA announcement accompanying the agreement puts it, "The alliance offers [our] customers a compelling value proposition, bringing together IONA's expertise in solving and supporting the integration needs of the world's most complex and highly distributed enterprise systems, with the industry's most popular open source application server."

JBoss founder Marc Fleury affirmed that “IONA is extremely capable of supporting the JBoss platform in complex, heterogeneous mission-critical environments, which will help give many enterprise customers the assurances they need to develop and deploy on the JBoss platform."

Meantime Chris Horn, CEO of IONA, noted IONA's "track record in leveraging standards-based software" to meet the requirements of just the environment Fleury mentioned.

Here's how IONA itself characterizes the move:

As part of the alliance, IONA will offer a range of enterprise-level consultancy, training and support options to the JBoss community. Support offerings can be bundled with IONA's current Enterprise Level Support agreements for its Orbix® and Artix™ families of integration products or on a stand-alone basis for JBoss customers. IONA will leverage the JBoss Group back office support structure for a complete coverage for customers.

"Together, IONA and JBoss are increasing the competitiveness of the the J2EE platform," said Pierre Fricke, executive vice president, Web Application Infrastructure, D.H. Brown Associates, when asked to comment on the announcement.