Red Hat will acquire privately held Amentra, a provider of systems-integration services to smooth the transition to service-oriented architecture (SOA) and business process management (BPM) projects.
“We are now focused on expanding further into the enterprise,” said Red Hat Vice President Craig Muzilla. “The depth of solution-oriented consulting services provided by Amentra will help enterprises begin deploying JBoss Enterprise Middleware products with confidence.”
Strong SOA Growth Ahead
The acquisition is intended to complement Red Hat’s recently announced Enterprise Acceleration Initiative, which targets the delivery of products, programs and services to help enterprises accelerate IT deployments, particularly in SOA and BPM. It comes amid an accelerating IT drive to adopt SOA, according to the latest survey from Forrester Research.
“A year ago, our data highlighted a general slowness in moving from SOA planning to actual use of SOA,” said Forrester Research Vice President Randy Heffner. “This slowness disappeared in 2007’s data, with strong growth in current use of SOA across North America, Europe and Asia Pacific regions.”
Even better, “a strong majority of current SOA users plan to do more SOA,” Heffner noted. “… more and more SOA users are seeing its role for enabling strategic business transformation.”
Heffner pointed out that the most critical aspects of SOA are business-oriented. “SOA technology is merely a foundation for business-oriented restructuring of IT’s processes and deliverables,” he added.
An Open-Source Middleware Play
Amentra has more than 140 employees at its offices in Philadelphia, Charlotte, Tampa, Richmond and Washington, D.C. When the deal is final, Amentra will function as an independent Red Hat company, with existing customers continuing “to receive the benefit of Amentra’s model, as they do today, with the breadth and depth that comes from the many synergies that Red Hat and Amentra bring to each other,” said Amentra CEO Matt Ernst.
Red Hat spent $350 million…