Liferay, MuleSoft Announce Partnership on Tcat Server

MuleSoft’s Tcat server has been a popular item as of late, if the partnerships formed surrounding it are any indication. Following news in March 2011 of a partnership between OpenLogic and MuleSoft centered on Tcat, Liferay recently announced a similar initiative. Here are the details, and what they mean for the channel.

Tcat, based on the open source Apache Tomcat servlet container, is a value-added resale product offering improved performance monitoring and diagnostics, deployment and security over generic Tomcat. Designed to be completely compatible with upstream code, Tcat is marketed as a hassle-free solution for organizations seeking to upgrade from legacy platforms such as IBM’s WebSphere and Oracle’s WebLogic.

Partnership

The announcement of MuleSoft and Liferay’s partnership comes amidst a flurry of recent engagement on the part of the latter company within the open source channel. The company announced other key partnerships earlier in 2011, and in March introduced a “Community Leadership Program” designed to afford third-party members of Liferay’s development community a more substantial role in the organization’s initiatives.

The specifics of this most recent Tcat partnership involve Liferay offering Liferay Portal Enterprise Edition with MuleSoft’s Tcat server built in. Liferay will provide all support for the product.

This agreement is similar to the one contracted between OpenLogic and MuleSoft in March 2011, but one notable difference in the Liferay-MuleSoft engagement is the single point of contact for support in the form of Liferay. The OpenLogic-MuleSoft deal, in contrast, has those two companies sharing support responsibilities.

Viewed from a broader perspective, the partnership between Liferay and MuleSoft is also fundamentally different from the one announced with OpenLogic in that for Liferay, the Tcat server will enhance a specific, preexisting product. OpenLogic’s engagement with Tcat centers on reselling Tcat itself, independent of any other product, with support services as the main point of added value.

These differences aside, this most recent news from Liferay and MuleSoft underlines the demand for VARs within the open source channel. Open source developers offer plenty of great products for free, but they rarely provide the support services that many end users require for production. This means that companies able to enhance support services or embed open source code within larger, ready-to-deploy products have a lot to gain from open source projects.

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