News
Green Hat to be Acquired by IBM
Big Blue wants to help enterprises cut testing costs without cutting corners.
IBM announced it will buy testing tools provider
Green Hat for an undisclosed price. Green Hat’s tools help application developers to test their software using cloud resources.
Green Hat will be incorporated into IBM's Rational Software business and be offered along with the company's application life cycle management (ALM) portfolio.
IBM said it wants to provide lower-cost ways of letting developers test and ensure the quality of their software without cutting corners. Properly testing software today requires a significant investment in simulation labs (costing between $5 million and $30 million), according to Charles Chu, IBM Rational's director of product management and strategy.
"That's not a trivial number no matter what size company you are," Chu said. "By providing this virtualized environment, the agile developer is able to come much closer to the vision of realizing continuous integration and continuous testing."
IBM emphasized that Green Hat's GH Tester, GH performance, and Green Hat Virtual Integration Environment (GH VIE) tools are designed for using cloud resources, Chu said that developers must use private clouds today. "We don't currently have any announced plans for a public cloud offering," Chu said. However IBM has a cloud service in beta that allows developers to provision a test environment.
GH VIE allows for cloud testing in a virtual environment, Chu noted. "Once the configuration is done, that environment is available and provisioned in a matter of minutes for a developer to run tests against."
Founded in 1996, Green Hat's tools support a variety of software environments, including those from IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, SAP, Software AG, Sonic MQ, and Tibco, as well as supporting Web services and Java protocols.
About the Author
Jeffrey Schwartz is editor of Redmond magazine and also covers cloud computing for Virtualization Review's Cloud Report. In addition, he writes the Channeling the Cloud column for Redmond Channel Partner. Follow him on Twitter @JeffreySchwartz.