Friday, 27 April 2007

Red Hat Buys MetaMatrix for SOA Apps

Red Hat, a provider of open-source solutions, has acquired MetaMatrix. The aim of the acquisition is to utilise MetaMatrix’s data-management solutions to stimulate the functional value of Red Hat's JBoss middleware for Service-Oriented Architectures (SOAs)...

Red Hat, a provider of open-source solutions, has acquired MetaMatrix. The aim of the acquisition is to utilise MetaMatrix’s data-management solutions to stimulate the functional value of Red Hat's JBoss middleware for Service-Oriented Architectures (SOAs).

Red Hat has also rolled out new JBoss offerings. The company said, "moving away from the current a la carte approach where customers mix and match different components to suit their IT projects to a set of integrated, tested, and certified JBoss Enterprise Platform distributions for the most common use cases."

"Clearly," said Forrester analyst Michael Goulde, "Red Hat wants to be a platform company like Oracle or Microsoft Relevant Products/Services."

The financial details of the deal were not disclosed. RedHat explained that MetaMatrix provides "a data services layer that decouples applications from their data sources and makes valuable data assets available as services in an SOA, freeing data from single application silos."

There is no widely-agreed upon definition of service-oriented architecture other than its literal translation that it is an architecture that relies on service-orientation as its fundamental design principle. Service-orientation describes an architecture that uses loosely coupled services to support the requirements of business processes and users. Resources on a network in an SOA environment are made available as independent services that can be accessed without knowledge of their underlying platform implementation. These concepts can be applied to business, software and other types of producer/consumer systems.