IBM buys Green Hat for software testing

IBM is set to purchase London-based Green Hat, which provides technology for testing applications without the need to use underlying hardware.

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The financial terms of the acquisition, announced on Wednesday, were not disclosed. The deal will give IBM cloud-based tools its customers can use to analyse the performance of major vendors' software in a controlled environment and test how it interacts with their existing IT stack.

"By using Green Hat's solutions, a virtual test environment can be set up in a matter of minutes", as opposed to the weeks needed to set up a physical lab for quality checking, IBM said in a statement.

Green Hat's technology allows developers to stress-test an application by hammering it with a very high number of I/O requests. It can also virtualise parts of an application via the GH Virtual Integration Environment. Businesses can plug the software into their existing infrastructure then bombard it with requests to see how it behaves, prior to being integrated.

IBM plans to integrate Green Hat's portfolio into its existing Rational software assurance line. The two are a good fit, said Ovum principal analyst Michael Azoff, who noted that Green Hat's test labs can handle complex differing systems, from mainframes to distributed cloud and mobile environments.

By using Green Hat's solutions, a virtual test environment can be set up in a matter of minutes.

   – IBM

"Green Hat provides a virtualised solution to this complexity that allows individual virtualised components to be switched in turn to their live counterparts and for effective systems-testing to be performed," Azoff said in a statement.

"The drive towards agile development, with higher frequency of testing and also testing earlier in the lifecycle, is producing huge pressures on [quality assurance]," he added. "Green Hat reduces the time to set up, run and return back to neutral test labs, and removes impediments to agile processes in mission-critical, large-scale projects."

Green Hat's products promise to help businesses to evaluate the performance of software products from IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, SAP and Tibco, among others. The company, which has headquarters in Wilmington, Delaware, as well as in London, will become part of IBM's Rational Software group.