By Graham K. Rogers

IBM has announced that as part of its continuing expansion into cloud technologies, it has acquired Green Hat, a company with major offices in the UK and in Delaware.

The full press release is as follows:

IBM today announced a definitive agreement to acquire Green Hat, a leader in software quality and testing solutions for the cloud and other environments. Financial terms were not disclosed.

Founded in 1996, Green Hat is jointly headquartered in London, England and Wilmington, Delaware. Green Hat helps customers improve the quality of software applications by enabling developers to leverage cloud computing technologies to conduct testing on a software application prior to its delivery. Historically, to run simulation testing on a software program, a development team must construct an actual testing lab made up of both hardware and software. This time consuming and labor intensive process has become even more compounded with the short development cycle needed to compete in rapidly expanding markets such as those for smart phones and tablets. By using Green Hat's solutions, a virtual test environment can be set up in a matter of minutes versus weeks, and for a fraction of the cost.

According to recent industry reports, software testing represents more than 50 percent of overall development costs, and testing teams often spend upwards of 30 percent of their time managing the complexity of the test environment. Green Hat creates a virtual environment that simulates a wide range of IT infrastructure elements, without the constraints of hardware or software services. This continuous test environment enables developers and quality professionals to test software earlier and more frequently throughout the software development lifecycle.

Upon the acquisition close, Green Hat will join IBM's Rational Software business. When combined with the IBM Rational Solution for Collaborative Lifecycle Management, developers and testers can achieve unprecedented levels of efficiency, effectiveness, and collaboration while delivering quality software to their business. IBM and Green Hat will help customers maximize continuous integration of an application, including creating virtual protocols, message formats, services, customization and engagement with third-party software. Development teams can avoid scrap and rework and dramatically reduce costly delays while achieving greater business agility and accelerating the delivery of software applications.

"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, IBM Rational. "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."

"We've been focused on transforming our customers' software development processes through innovative testing and quality improvements," said Peter Cole, CEO, Green Hat. "We are looking forward to bringing Green Hat's innovative application virtualization and continuous integration testing expertise to IBM customers who have a growing business need to better manage their complex testing environments."

The Green Hat software testing solutions also will be offered through IBM Global Business Services' Application Management Services (AMS). IBM AMS provides strategy, design, implementation, testing and managed services for application virtualization to accelerate customer results.

Green Hat is an automated testing technology leader, operating worldwide with a Global 2000 customer base. Green Hat makes automated testing simple for complex systems relying on Cloud, Web Services, messaging, SOA (Service Oriented Architecture), ESB (Enterprise Service Bus), BPM (Business Process Management), CEP (Complex Event Processing), SAP and other distributed technologies. Their diverse range of customers includes prestigious representation in financial services, telecommunications, healthcare, transportation and the energy industry.

Graham K. Rogers teaches at the Faculty of Engineering, Mahidol University in Thailand. He wrote in the Bangkok Post, Database supplement on IT subjects. For the last seven years of Database he wrote a column on Apple and Macs.