Cloud Testing Boost For Rational As IBM Buys Green Hat

According to recent research by industry sources and the National Institute of Standards and technology (NIST), 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.

Virtual infrastructure

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 QA professionals to test software earlier and more frequently throughout the software development lifecycle, IBM said.

“IBM’s announcement to acquire Green Hat will complement its existing application lifecycle management tools portfolio in providing a capability to rapidly set up test labs for complex heterogeneous systems spanning mainframe to distributed environments, including cloud and mobile,” said Michael Azoff, principal analyst at Ovum. “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.”

With IBM Rational Solution combined with Green Hat, IBM will help customers maximise continuous integration of an application, including creating virtual protocols, message formats, services, customisation and engagement with third-party software, IBM said. Development teams can avoid scrap and rework and dramatically reduce costly delays while achieving greater business agility and accelerating the delivery of software applications.

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

Service delivery

The Green Hat software testing products 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 virtualisation to accelerate customer results.

“Green Hat’s software testing solutions enable developers to quickly create virtual test environments in minutes to run simulations rather than set up new hardware and software labs,” ISI’s Marshall said. “Green Hat is already an IBM partner (as well as ORCL and TIBX partner) and its solutions will complement IBM’s Rational product line which helps manage the software development lifecycle from design through testing. We believe IBM is among the best in large-cap technology at building software capabilities through acquisition and has been increasing its efforts in recent months (for example: i2, Algorithmics, Q1 Labs, DemandTec, Emptoris).”

“The drive toward agile development with higher frequency of testing and also testing earlier in the lifecycle is producing huge pressures on QA,” added Azoff. “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 automated testing technology is used throughout the company’s Global 2000 customer base. Green Hat makes automated testing simple for complex systems relying on cloud, Web services, messaging, Service Oriented Architecture(SOA), Enterprise Service Bus (ESB), Business Process Management (BPM), Complex Event Processing (CEP), SAP and other distributed technologies.

The company’s diverse range of customers includes representation in financial services, telecommunications, health care, transportation and the energy industry.