Red Hat acquires MetaMatrix, reworks enterprise middleware offerings

Linux and open-source software developer Red Hat has announced a new acquisition and a new strategy for its JBoss middleware product line. MetaMatrix, a provider of data management products and services founded in 1998, will become part of the Red Hat JBoss division, which itself was purchased by Red Hat not one year ago. MetaMatrix's technology is used to make data access across a wide range of data sources and data-consuming applications more rational and orderly. Terms of the MetaMatrix purchase were not made public.

At the same time, Red Hat announced changes to its JBoss product strategy. The current product model will be replaced by a more limited range of "enterprise platform" distributions tailored to the most popular situations customers use the solution for. The company is pitching these unified platform bundles as a straightforward path for legacy application migration.

At the same time, the open source development side of JBoss will be set loose to release and support their own product bundles. The move is roughly analogous to the spinoff of Red Hat's desktop Linux endeavor into the Fedora project, which produces technology builds with community and Red Hat technology but without the Red Hat support subscription model.