Red Hat has signed a definitive agreement to acquire the business of MetaMatrix, a leader in data management and integration software. This market is estimated to reach $1.3B in 2007 according to Forrester Research. 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.

While SOA offers a cost-effective opportunity to modernize legacy infrastructures and provide true interoperability across applications and software components, it alone does not resolve data access challenges and the physical and semantic differences among disparate, physical data sources, says Red Hat. 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. It does this while simultaneously providing mechanisms for data consistency, security and compliance.

Ray Lane, General Partner with Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and MetaMatrix Board Member, applauded the acquisition and its implications for the future of data management: “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 company is also integrating technology from last year's JBoss acquisition. Fully inclusive subscription support is available now for the JBoss Enterprise Application Platform. The Application Platform helps customers easily deploy and host applications and web services. It integrates several products into a single distribution: JBoss Application Server for business logic and clustering; Hibernate for object/relational mapping and persistence; and JBoss Seam for building next-generation Web 2.0 applications. Future JBoss Enterprise Platform offerings will be available for portal applications, SOA integration, and business process automation requirements.

With the creation of JBoss Enterprise Platform distributions, Red Hat says it is freeing up the JBoss.org community from the constraints of the productization process so it can focus on what it does best: innovate. The newly redesigned and rebranded JBoss.org site debuted today with new tools and developer-focused content to enhance the participant experience. JBoss.org remains the the R&D hotbed for JBoss Enterprise Platforms, but from today onwards, its 30-plus projects will have more latitude to deliver bleeding edge technologies faster to users. Once these releases are enterprise-ready, they will be integrated into JBoss Enterprise Platform distributions. Project releases remain freely available for download under an LGPL, GPL, or Apache open source license. Ad-hoc support for JBoss.org releases will be provided through the community.