Asia is shaping up as a competitive area for two open source middleware organizations, following JBoss's latest partnering deal.

The open source specialist has signed a consulting and systems integration agreement with Nomura Research Institute (NRI).

NRI will provide Level 1 and Level 2 professional support, systems integration and management services while JBoss will provide NRI with development support, training and professional certification.

JBoss's partnership follows increased activity in the region by ObjectWeb Consortium.

ObjectWeb is developing its own open source middleware stack that includes a Java application server; this month it reached an agreement with China's Guangzhou Middleware Research Center (GMRC) which will foster ObjectWeb's presence in China. Among its activities, GMRC will recruit new consortium members and promote contributions to the ObjectWeb code.

The consortium, meanwhile, is sponsoring Vietnam's COSGov conference on use of open source in e-government. ®

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