IBM acquires Green Hat

1. What technology does Green Hat provide?
Green Hat technology helps customers improve the quality of software applications by enabling developers to conduct testing earlier in the lifecycle by virtualizing dependent software and services prior to the application’s delivery on and off the cloud. 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 technology, a virtual test environment can be set up in a matter of minutes versus weeks, and for a fraction of the cost.

2. What is creating the need for Green Hat technology?
According to 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. * There are three major trends that are driving the need for the kind of test virtualization that is offered by Green Hat technology.

1. Increasing cost of quality - With the rise in global labor wages, outsourcing and off shoring testing strategies as a way to drive down the cost of software development has reached its practical end of life and is no longer sufficiently changing the dynamics and cost of software quality.

2. Increasing development complexity - Today’s applications and manufactured products are increasingly complex. While software is fueling this innovation and growth, new challenges for testing composite, heterogeneous applications, products and services while keeping pace with development teams has increased.

3. Balancing quality and speed - Software development teams have been finding new and innovative ways to drive down cost while increasing their flexibility and software development productivity through agile development and the use of automated tooling. Test teams can no longer keep up with development’s increased agility and the velocity at which they deliver working software code to be tested.

* National Institute of Standards and Technology, The economic impacts of inadequate infrastructure for software testing.

3. How will Green Hat technology be positioned relative to what IBM offers today for quality management?
Green Hat’s integration testing and test virtualization technology strengthens IBM’s quality management portfolio. When combined with IBM’s quality management portfolio, IBM offers the most complete solution available today for agile software development and testing, with flexible options such as the cloud.

4. Technically, what will change in the portfolio with this acquisition?
IBM has enhanced its quality management and testing solution for software development to help customers virtualize heterogeneous hardware, software and services to provide 24x7 testing capabilities; reduce infrastructure costs of traditional testing environments through cloud based implementation; and deliver earlier, end-to-end continuous integration testing across hardware, software, cloud-based dependencies.

Extending our commitment to agile software development solutions to help customers improve development and test velocity with cloud accelerating delivery of software quality; share test environments across their team enabling parallel development; and employ traceability and collaborate in-context across their development domains.

5. Can you provide scenarios where Green Hat technology might be used?
Scenario 1 - Creating application domains or including third party services in-house on physical infrastructure or cloud instances for the purposes of testing can be expensive to the business. Having the ability to virtualize applications and dependent services for the purpose of testing allows test teams to validate key integrations at a much lower cost to their project improving the productivity and velocity of your test resources.
Scenario 2 - Waiting for important code to be delivered by developers can introduce risk to a project. Discovering integration issues late in the development cycle drives up cost and can negatively impact the delivery schedule. Green Hat technology provides the ability to simulate dependent services and entire applications much earlier in the process allowing you to test important integrations before the code has been delivered and identify defects much earlier and at a lower cost.

6. With the acquisition, how will my level of support change?
Green Hat customers will continue to access Green Hat technical support in the same manner with which they are familiar until further notice. Green Hat technical support will continue to provide assistance to the clients designated contacts.

7. What are IBM’s plans for Green Hat products?
IBM has implemented Green Hat technology as a strategic part of the Rational quality management portfolio. In addition to further integrating Green Hat technology with IBM’s offerings and consistent with our ongoing commitment to innovation and leadership in the software quality domain, we continue to engage and gather input from IBM, Green Hat and our ecosystem of partners, integrators and customers as to possible future product enhancements.

8. I am a Green Hat customer today, what should I expect?
The Green Hat product portfolio will be backed by IBM resources. IBM has already made Green Hat a key component of its Rational quality management portfolio, complimenting existing quality management capabilities and solutions. IBM also currently plans to continue to grow and enhance the functionality of Green Hat's technology. Click here to learn more on Doing Business with IBM.

9. Where can I learn more about what IBM offers for quality management and testing?
Find out more information on the IBM solutions:

• IBM Software quality management and testing solution

Last updated: October 16, 2012