Guest: James Falkner (LinkedIn) | Reza Rahman (LinkedIn)
Companies: Red Hat (Twitter) | Microsoft (Twitter)
Show: Let’s Talk 

Many companies are focusing on modernizing their applications and moving to the cloud, yet this transition can be challenging for both large and small companies. JBoss Enterprise Application Platform (JBoss EAP) on Microsoft Azure helps customers modernize their existing applications without having to start from scratch, tapping into the benefits that cloud can bring.

In this episode of TFiR: Let’s Talk, James Falkner, Director of Product Marketing, Hybrid Platforms Adoption at Red Hat, and Reza Rahman, Principal Program Manager for Java on Azure at Microsoft, talk about Red Hat JBoss Enterprise Application Platform (EAP) and how they are helping customers move to the cloud. They talk through some of the new updates and what we can expect from the partnership in the future.

Key highlights from this video interview are:

• Red Hat recently partnered with Microsoft to bring their flagship Java EE platform to the cloud, meaning that users can take advantage of the capabilities in Azure to enhance the value of the EAP on a global scale.
• Rahman talks about how both Red Hat and Microsoft customers are benefitting from the JBoss EAP saying that many of their customers are looking to modernize their mission-critical enterprise applications using a robust solution without having to completely redo the application.
• Falkner discusses the maturity of the JBoss product saying that many of their customers are looking for incremental improvements such as modernizing by moving apps out of the data center onto the cloud without changing the app significantly but still taking advantage of the scale.
• They discuss the reasons why large customers want to move to the cloud, such as data center exit and globalization. Key challenges that customers encounter in the transition are ensuring that things remain operationally stable and reasonably cost-effective and upskilling.
• Red Hat’s partnership with Microsoft started out with Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), but it has since expanded to more of the portfolio. Falkner talks about Red Hat’s decision to partner more deeply with Microsoft and the benefits of their integrated support offering for their customers.
• Rahman discusses Microsoft’s journey to embracing open source on the cloud and how as a relative newcomer to Java it has been key to partner with Red Hat.
• Falkner takes us through the three new updates to their offerings for EAP on Azure: support for clustering, the availability of Red Hat OpenShift on Azure, and EAP Pay As You Go, a consumption-based offering.
• Red Hat and Microsoft are working on a number of things to evolve these offerings, such as the ability to do free SKUs so that customers can see what the operational mechanisms look like and then upgrade later to paid SKUs for production use.
• Rahman talks about how they are always looking to evolve their offerings on the VM side of things and are actively working to improve the ease of use and quality on that side. He discusses some of the specific things they are working on such as scaling out customers and making it more price-competitive to use JBoss EAP via app service.
• JBoss EAP 8 will be released later this year bringing with it new capabilities such as Jakarta EE 10 support.

This summary was written by Emily Nicholls.