Red Hat Buys MetaMatrix

Red Hat, one of the largest companies dedicated to open source software, has recently signed a definitive agreement with MetaMatrix, an U.S.-based company providing data management software for the service-oriented applications (SOA). The Server-orientation principle represents an architecture using loosely coupled services in order to support all the user's requirements. SOA' s main goal is to provide interoperability between applications and software components.

Red Hat is best known for its Red Hat Enterprise Linux distribution and the Fedora project, an open source project supported by its community. Once with the Fedora OLPC Project, Red Hat engineers also work with OLPC (One Laptop Per Child) non-profit organization, especially on the adaptation of a Fedora slimmed-down version to run as operating systems on computers provided by OLPC.

Through MetaMatrix Enterprise, MetaMatrix provides declarative tools for creating SQL-based and Web service-based data services, a repository for storing data service definitions with relevant metadata, and an execution environment providing enterprise performance, data integrity, and security.

The terms of the acquisition contract between Red and MetaMatrix were not made public. The MetaMatrix takeover is estimated to end in 60 days when MetaMatrix will be incorporated into Red Hat's JBoss Division, as Tim Yeaton, senior vice president of enterprise solutions with Red Hat mentioned. Red Had has bought the JBoss Java-based platform for US$ 420 million in April 2006, expecting an acceleration of the applications running on a low-cost, open source platform. As it is Java-based, JBoss is cross-platform, usable on any operating system that supports Java. JBoss implements a full Java Enterprise Edition suite of services.