IBM Moves To Acquire Testing Tool Vendor Green Hat

IBM is acquiring Green Hat, a supplier of software quality and testing tools, under a deal announced Wednesday.

IBM did not disclose financial terms of the deal. The company said it expects to complete the acquisition by the end of this month, pending completion of regulatory approvals and other closing conditions.

Green Hat is based in London, England, and Wilmington Delaware.

Green Hat's technology simplifies automated testing of complex systems including cloud Web services, messaging, service-oriented architecture, enterprise service bus, business process management, and complex event processing software.

The Green Hat tools are specifically used to construct virtual test environments for running test simulations on newly developed software – an often laborious and time-consuming process, according to IBM. The company cited studies that show that software testing accounts for more than 50 percent of overall development costs, and testing teams spend upwards of 30 percent of their time managing test environment complexity.

Green Hat will become part of IBM's Rational Software business and its technology will be combined with the Rational Solution for Collaborative Lifecycle Management system, according to IBM. The company also will use the Green Hat technology to expand the IBM Global Business Services' application management services.

"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," said Kristof Kloeckner, general manager of IBM Rational, in a statement. "Green Hat's application virtualization capabilities will help our customers accelerate their delivery of business critical software."