To get JBoss to earn its keep, Red Hat, which wants to be a billion-dollar company in a few years, is going to try to accelerate its adoption by the enterprise aiming, as it says, "to capture 50% of enterprise middleware loads by 2015."

That's 50% of the workloads in long-off 2015. It didn't address what it does between now and then. But it seems it has to convince people they can run their business on open source middleware.

So it's kicking off an "Enterprise Acceleration" initiative. It means to add products to its middleware portfolio, sponsor new open source projects, grow its partner ecosystem, and offer new enterprise-class performance and interoperability resources. It also means to buck up sales and marketing.

It said it would set up facilities for performance tuning. testing applications, live certification and migration.

JBoss, which cost Red Hat around $325 million a couple of years ago, runs on Red Hat, Windows and other Linuxes.