Red Hat is buying a privately held proprietary software company called Metamatrix Inc that’s backed by Kleiner Perkins, the Invus Group and Integral Capital Partners on undisclosed terms.

Red Hat senior VP of enterprise solutions Tim Yeaton said it will supply the piece that was missing after Red Hat bought JBoss last year for $350 million and goose a new round of Unix-to-Linux migration by moving silo’d legacy applications to JBoss Enterprise Middleware.

 

Guess IBM, Sun and HP better hide their children.

 

What Metamatrix does, and has been at it for nine years, is free data from the bonds of a single application silo by decoupling applications from their data source via a so-called metadata-managing federated data services SOA layer.

 

And that’s what it’s going to do for JBoss when they get it worked out, exposing data as services for integration, workflow and business process modeling – and in the process reducing redundancy and complexity.

 

Red Hat will be able to go to CIOs, appearing like a Godsend on their doorsteps, offering to free up the 70% of their budget that’s devoted to integration.

 

And once Metamatrix is open sourced – a process that should take a year – and put on a subscription basis – and part of JBoss they’ll be able to argue against the high acquisition, high lock-in costs of inflexible hardwired proprietary application infrastructure vendors that prohibit shared corporate IT assets, data reuse, interoperability and business agility.

 

Definitely sounds like an answer to a maiden’s prayer.

 

JBoss + Metamatrix as a migration path to the bliss of true SOA. See, according Red Hat. SOA alone doesn’t resolve the data access challenges and the physical and semantic differences among disparate physical data sources. Metamatrix, it says, eliminates these challenges, freeing the data while at the same time providing the mechanism for data consistency, security and compliance.

 

Of course, all this makes Red Hat sound a bit like Microsoft especially when it talks about providing an “end-to-end infrastructure.”

 

And to reinforce that objective, Red Hat is moving JBoss away from an à la carte approach where customers mix and match different components to suit their IT projects to a set of integrated, tested and certified JBoss Enterprise Platform distributions for the most common use cases. These new distributions will come as a single download and will be supported by a subscription with automated updates and patches and multi-year service level agreements (SLAs).

 

The first offering will be the JBoss Enterprise Application Platform with the JBoss Application Server, Hibernate and Seam. Others will be for portal applications, SOA integration and business process automation.

 

Underneath this development is a bifurcation of JBoss into an enterprise version and a superset community version sort of like Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Fedora. JBoss.org will feed the enterprise JBoss bleeding-edge technologies as they are stabilized.

 

Red Hat also introduced new developer support subscriptions with two different SLA options that are supposed to support ISVs and corporate developers from development through production.

 

It should take Red Hat 60 days to close the Metamatrix acquisition.

 

Metamatrix’ customer have, in the past, included Citibank, Merrill Lynch, Credit Suisse, the Department of Defense, Lockheed Martin, Motorola, HP and Sun.

 

Its technology includes a metadata management system, a server-based runtime, design and testing tools and an administrative console.

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