Green Hat buy to boost IBM's app lifecycle management

IBM has announced that it will be acquiring software quality testing company, Green Hat, a move which an analyst says will boost Big Blue's application lifecycle management portfolio.

In a statement Wednesday, Michael Azoff, principal analyst at Ovum, said: "IBM's announcement to acquire Green Hat will complement its existing application lifecycle management tools portfolio in providing a capability to rapidly setup test labs for complex heterogeneous systems spanning mainframe to distributed environments, including cloud and mobile."

Azoff explained that Green Hat's virtualization technology allows individual virtualized components to be switched instead of their live counterparts and for effective system testing to be performed.

According to the analyst, the drive toward agile development with higher frequency of testing and also testing earlier in the lifecycle is producing huge pressures on QA (quality assurance). "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," he said.

In its announcement, IBM did not share financial terms of its latest acquisition but noted that Green Hat would be folded into its rational software business unit.

Citing industry reports, Big Blue said software testing made up more than 50 percent of a company's total development cost, with testing teams often spending more than 30 percent of their time managing the complexity of the test environment.

With Green Hat's technology, the IT giant said developers and quality professionals will be able to test software earlier and more frequently during the software development cycle. "Green Hat creates a virtual environment that simulates a wide range of IT infrastructure elements, without the constraints of hardware or software services," it said.