| Red Hat acquires MetaMatrix, targets Unix apps market |
Apr. 25, 2007
Red Hat Inc. announced on April 24 that it will be acquiring MetaMatrix, a company that specializes in data access software and services, in an effort to make it easier for business customers to move their "siloed legacy applications" to JBoss Enterprise Middleware.
According to Red Hat, siloed legacy applications are ones, which are hard-wired to data sources. This, in turn, creates inflexible application infrastructures that prohibit shared corporate IT assets, data reuse, interoperability, and business agility.
Red Hat officials said that the MetaMatrix acquisition will add a federated data services SOA (service-oriented architecture) layer for JBoss Enterprise Middleware. This will enable developers to use legacy data in JBoss-based services for integration, workflow and business process modeling. According to Raleigh, N.C.-based Red Hat, JBoss Enterprise Middleware will then offer an open, low-cost, high-value migration foundation for customers to modernize these legacy application infrastructures to SOAs.
"With many enterprises spending as much as 70 percent of their IT budget on maintaining stove-piped legacy applications while a backlog of projects continues piling up, it's clear that proprietary application infrastructure vendors have failed to deliver relief for the CIO," said Tim Yeaton, Red Hat's senior vice president of enterprise solutions. "Until now, enterprises have had to choose from solutions with high acquisition, high integration, and high lock-in costs. By applying the attributes that made Red Hat Enterprise Linux the No. 1 Unix migration platform to our JBoss Enterprise Middleware, Red Hat is providing customers a migration path to long-term value, choice, and control of their IT infrastructure."
Specifically, according to Red Hat, while SOA offers a cost-effective opportunity to modernize legacy infrastructures and provide true interoperability across applications and software components, it does not resolve data access challenges and the physical and semantic differences among disparate, physical data sources. MetaMatrix eliminates these challenges with 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, Red Hat officials said.
Ray Lane, general partner with Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, a major venture capital firm and MetaMatrix board member, applauded the acquisition in a statement: "IT infrastructure is continuously evolving and enterprises are always looking for low-risk, low-TCO solutions that will help them keep up with the changes while ensuring that the data -- their most valuable asset -- remains relevant, accessible, and reusable in any situation. We see federated data services as key to this, which is why we invested in MetaMatrix. Red Hat has a clear vision for providing an end-to-end, open source infrastructure that addresses these needs, and we are pleased that these two visionary companies will now work as one to deliver valuable solutions for customers' data management needs."
The consummation of the transaction is subject to the satisfaction of certain conditions to closing set forth in the acquisition agreement. Once the transaction is completed, MetaMatrix will be integrated into Red Hat's JBoss division.
Eventually, Yeaton said, "MetaMatrix will be licensed under an open-source license." MetaMatrix software includes a metadata management system, a server-based runtime, design and testing tools, and an administrative console. At this time, however, Red Hat officials are unable to say when the code will be open-sourced.
-- Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols
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