This is just a blog post that has more commercial nature, but you can’t have one without the other. In fact this is what keeps Apache Camel alive and doing so well, due also to its commercial success.
This report may be of interest to people who are looking for hard evidence of the value add of using Apache Camel commercially, from products such as JBoss Fuse.
IDC interviewed 6 organizations that report achieving significant business value by using Red Hat® JBoss® Fuse, in particular, and making their application integration and development efforts more efficient and productive. These 6 organizations are achieving a 3 year average return on investment (ROI) of 488% and earning back their investments in JBoss Fuse in 8.2 months.
The report is downloadable as-is (no registration) from Red Hat website at: http://www.redhat.com/en/resources/value-red-hat-integration-products
Some of the highlights I see in relationship to Apache Camel are:
- JBoss Fuse allows developers to program in Java, which becomes more of an extension to the application rather than a separate development experience. This resulted in making JBoss Fuse easier to adopt. As one customer explained, “One of the biggest advantages that we see with this product is that the integration tool is provided as a domain language. So it’s like a natural extension of the Java language. You write integrations as if you’re writing Java code. That means that all of the skills you need to debug in Java are the same skills required when you write integrations in this language. You don’t have to go to another IDE or another toolset to understand how to write it. It’s just Java code.”
- Another customer cited the team’s desire to actually know and understand what the code is as a reason for adoption: “Before, we had a problem with the software, and actually being able to prove to the vendor that there was a problem before they would get around to fixing it is a lot harder if you can’t actually see any of the code. And this is not a small issue … In order to lodge a request, we would often have to prove to them by writing a sample program and prove that they are the cause of the issue — in a way that it’s reproducible in their environment.”
- A shipment and logistics company’s application integration and development efforts benefit from the flexibility of JBoss Fuse’s use of Apache Camel: “JBoss gives us the opportunity to help the developers in ways that wouldn’t necessarily be possible with a graphical user interface tool.”
- Customers also said that they benefit from Red Hat’s support and the ability to have access to and understand the code used for their applications. One customer praised Red Hat’s support: “The customer service support from Red Hat has been exceptional. They gave us access directly to the developers who are writing the code, whereas it can be hard to actually get access to developers with other solutions.”
Just a note to the last bullet. Our support program allowed the customer direct access to myself and other Camel core committers, so we were able to help them quickly, and also fix and improve Apache Camel based on their issues and findings.
The report has more details, and hard numbers stating the “before” vs “after” and their gains (development time, performance, and many others) and cost benefits, such as pretty graphs as shown below:
| Reference: | IDC Report on Business Value of using JBoss Fuse (with Apache Camel) from our JCG partner Claus Ibsen at the Claus Ibsen riding the Apache Camel blog. |
