On January 4th, IBM announced, it is going to acquire the cloud and SOA integration service company Green Hat. Testing is one of the main challenges when developing cloud or SOA based applications. Buying Green Hat IBM hopes to offer more productive testing approaches for such types of large scale software systems. According to IBM, Green Hat will be integrated into IBM Rational Solution.
Green Hat was founded in 1996 with headquarters jointly located in London, UK, as well as in Wilmington, Delaware, USA. The company is describing its market focus as follows:
We know the differences in testing requirements associated with integration, BPM and governance platforms. Green Hat designs specific functionality and process into the solutions for each vendor to assure lifecycle coverage including unit, functional, integration, regression, performance, virtualized application and run time testing.
For that purpose, Green Hat is currently offering different products such as:
- GH Tester to automatically execute functional tests for projects that involve SOA, BPM or integration challenges,
- GH Performance to add performance tests to GH Tester, and,
- GH VIE to simulate environments.
Green Hat claims to have a lot of experiences in testing solutions that use technologies from IBM, Microsoft, SAP, Software AG, Sonic, Tibco, and Oracle. It created the aforementioned product portfolio for supporting such large scale software development projects.
IBM’s Kristof Kloeckner, General Manager, IBM Rational explains the motivation behind the acquisition:
This acquisition extends IBM’s leadership in driving business agility and software quality by changing the way enterprises can manage software development cost, test cycle time and risk. Together, we offer the most complete solution available today for agile software development and testing, with flexible options such as the cloud. Green Hat’s application virtualization capabilities will help our customers accelerate their delivery of business critical software.
More detailed information on the deal is currently not available. Thus, it remains to be seen how Green Hat’s portfolio will be merged into that of IBM and help to boost customer productivity in terms of testing.
The days seem to remain cloudy, at least in the IT world.