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IBM (previous CloudAve coverage) today announced their intent to acquire the London based software quality testing solution, Green Hat. With this move, IBM is preparing Rational Software for the hybrid era where enterprises will have complex environments including cloud based infrastructure. This is an interesting move considering the fact that Rational Software already has Rational Quality Manager as a part of their tool set. With Green Hat, IBM Rational can support a wide range of traditional platforms like TIBCO, webMethods and also modern day platforms supporting REST or cloud based platforms. When I attended IBM Innovate 11, IBM told me that they are still watching the cloud adoption trends before they make a move. I guess this acquisition signals their intent to go forward with a cloud strategy.
In fact, software testing represents more than 50% of the development costs in the enterprises, a fact highlighted by companies like Skytap (previous CloudAve coverage) betting their early stage business on test and dev. As enterprises embrace cloud as a part of their infrastructure, their IT environment gets more complex (before they can get simple) and any software development tool should be able to support such complex environments. In this regard, IBM’s Green Hat acquisition is interesting because it can help simulate many hardware and software environments to test applications and integrate continuously. This not only reduces the costs associated with testing environments but also accelerates the time to market.
As PaaS makes its foray into enterprises, it will be interesting to see the evolution of traditional developer tools. This might be the first step taken by IBM Rational Division to stay competitive in such a PaaSy future. However, there is a danger associated with adding more and more tools into a comprehensive developer solution like Rational Software. Younger developers prefer simplicity in their development environment and adding complexity by acquisition may not work out well all the time. We will have to wait and watch how IBM Rational Software evolves to meet the needs of the modern day enterprise developers in the coming years.
Related articles
- IBM buys Green Hat for cloud-based app testing (gigaom.com)
- IBM buys Green Hat for virty dev tools (go.theregister.com)
- IBM acquiring software testing vendor Green Hat (infoworld.com)
- IBM Is Buying Software Testing Company Green Hat (blogs.wsj.com)
