Versant on Tuesday announced that it is open-sourcing its ORM and data persistence platform and heading up an Eclipse Foundation project to help simplify Java 2 Platform, Enterprise Edition development.

Fremont, Calif.-based Versant Corp. has announced that it is contributing its commercial mapping tools and runtimes for EJB (Enterprise Java Beans) 3.0 persistence and JDO (Java Data Objects) 2.0 for object-relational mapping to the open source community.

Robert Greene, vice president of product strategy at Versant, said in addition to heading up an Eclipse project based on the JSR (Java Specification Request) 220 object-relational mapping standard, Versant will build out a services business to help enterprises "bridge the gap between traditional Java 2 Enterprise Edition persistence and new ORM architectures."

Indeed, Greene said Versant is "pretty excited" about this move and is well-equipped to handle the effort, as the company has been participating in both the EJB and JDO expert groups in the JCP (Java Community Process).

However, some observers see Versant's plan as a desperate move by a desperate company that was delisted from the Nasdaq stock exchange last month.

Read more here about the SCO Group's struggle to fight Nasdaq delisting.

"We're making a very large and strong move to open source with the software stack," Greene said. "We're going to provide a quality tool and then support that tool," he said.

Greene added that IBM Corp. has retained Versant as a partner for IBM's J2EE practice.

"We are experts in the old EJB 2.1 world, so we're in the perfect position to help people move from the old world of 2.1 to EJB 3.0," he said.

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