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Red Hat has signed a definitive agreement to acquire the business of MetaMatrix, including rights to all MetaMatrix products as well as the talented team of people developing, testing, supporting, and selling MetaMatrix solutions. The transaction is subject to the satisfaction of certain conditions to closing set forth in the acquisition agreement. Through this acquisition, Red Hat will supplement its service-oriented architecture (SOA) offerings by adding powerful enterprise data management capabilities to its open source architecture.
Founded in 1999, MetaMatrix is a pioneer in federated data services and metadata management. Its software is used by data-intensive organizations. MetaMatrix's enterprise data management software enables data to be accessed from disparate data sources and used in any form in any application. As a result, organizations can reduce the application development and integration costs associated with accessing and reconciling disparate data, while improving its overall utilization and consistency.
Enterprise data and information play a critical role within our customers' SOA initiatives. While Red Hat's open source architecture delivers value to customers by helping them unlock the value of open source at the operating system and middleware layers, we have not yet offered customers a way to alleviate their lock-in at the data and information layer. Our current SOA product portfolio focuses mostly on transaction intensive workloads. Data intensive workloads are quite challenging as well, and the need for a data management layer that efficiently and reliably enables federated access to a wide range of heterogeneous data sources is increasing.
Enterprises are looking to eliminate application stovepipes, where applications are 'hardwired' to underlying platforms and data sources and little code or business logic is reusable. SOA enables more flexible and reusable services that may be reconfigured and augmented more swiftly than traditional stovepipe applications. SOA can accelerate time-to-business objective, resulting in better business agility.
Today's complex business environment is subject to increasing regulation, forcing enterprises to become accountable and transparent with their data. Under pressure from regulations and potential legal liability, enterprises struggle to achieve a "single source of the truth" — the idea that one set of data can be trusted as being fully accurate and accountable. The drivers for greater unification are clear, and compliance is only one of many forces pushing organizations to achieve a more integrated view of their enterprise data.
MetaMatrix offers a federated data services approach to data management where data is decoupled from data sources and from the applications and processes that consume the data. Instead of managing multiple data sources for different applications and trying to keep them reconciled with one another, users can take any data from any data source and use it with any application. MetaMatrix products alleviate the need to create yet another new copy of the data. This makes it easier for organizations to share information assets between business units and partners more quickly and easily.
MetaMatrix products provide real-time heterogeneous access to enterprise data sources residing on a wide range of platforms and present the data in the desired format for immediate application consumption. Through a model-driven approach, application teams can create, deploy, and manage data services that simplify data integration. These data services enable users to access a single view of their data from multiple disparate systems. They also perform the necessary semantic mediation and vocabulary management to get the data into the right form - all without software programming. Deploying data services with MetaMatrix can help to provide enterprise-scale performance, security, metadata management, and overall manageability.
Red Hat has signed an agreement to acquire the business of MetaMatrix, not the legal entity. After the transaction closes, MetaMatrix's operations will be integrated into the JBoss division within Red Hat to help accelerate our strategy for building out a complete open source platform for SOA.
MetaMatrix is an enterprise data management provider and currently offers its software in three packages: MetaMatrix Enterprise, MetaMatrix Dimension, and MetaMatrix Query. MetaMatrix software bridges the gap between diverse data sources and the new forms of data required by new projects, applications, and architectures. This gap makes it difficult for enterprises to provide access to data from disparate sources, resolve semantic differences between sources and consumers of data, and deliver performance that meets service level agreements. With MetaMatrix, developers and architects create, deploy, and manage data services that access, transform, integrate, and aggregate data to provide the information needed by applications while hiding the complex details of diverse physical data sources. By bridging the gap with MetaMatrix, application teams can reduce development effort and streamline project timeframes and budgets.
MetaMatrix Enterprise is a powerful data service management system that enables rapid, model-driven creation, deployment, and management of data services. MetaMatrix Enterprise provides declarative tools for creating a wide range of data services that can be accessed through relational or Web service protocols, a repository for storing data service definitions with relevant metadata, and a robust execution environment that provides enterprise performance, data integrity, and security. MetaMatrix Enterprise addresses the diverse data service requirements of many of today's corporations and government agencies.
MetaMatrix Dimension provides a subset of MetaMatrix Enterprise capabilities and is ideal for projects focusing on Web services and XML. It enables rapid, model-driven creation, deployment, and optimization of data services that are implemented as standards-compliant Web services. MetaMatrix Dimension supports quick Web service-enablement of data sources, and also provides declarative tools for creating Web services and delivering the XML-based data structures applications need. It streamlines deployment, embedding Web service execution in your environment and optimizing performance of interactions with data sources.
MetaMatrix Query is an embeddable Java distributed query component that helps Java application developers streamline development and maintenance of applications that use data from two or more relational databases. With MetaMatrix Query you deploy a data service that, when embedded in an application, acts as a single Java database connectivity (JDBC) driver, facilitating all application access to data from multiple, distributed relational databases, and federating data from those sources. Because MetaMatrix Query can make multiple data sources look like one and it optimizes performance of SQL queries submitted against this virtual database, MetaMatrix Query is an ideal way to federate data for Java applications while decoupling data access and integration from application code.
MetaMatrix technologies will be packaged and incorporated into the JBoss Enterprise Middleware technology roadmap. We will focus initially on releasing the code under an open source license and promoting the MetaMatrix technologies within the JBoss.org open source community. We will integrate some of the MetaMatrix capabilities into the JBoss Enterprise Application Platform (launched on April 24) and future offerings for SOA integration (targeted for end of 2007). We will also introduce, as appropriate, new JBoss-branded product offerings for customers and channel partners encompassing both JBoss and MetaMatrix technologies.
Federated data services is an emerging but powerful technology and MetaMatrix is one of less than a handful of implementations in the market. By freeing the previously closed source MetaMatrix offerings, Red Hat will bring this high end technology to the open source community. JBoss.org is the natural place for us to open source MetaMatrix technologies, which will be aligned with other JBoss.org projects. The community is encouraged to participate in advancing the MetaMatrix technologies.
Like all JBoss Enterprise Middleware, the MetaMatrix code base is multi-platform and will continue to be. As such, Red Hat will not be merging MetaMatrix's code base into Red Hat Enterprise Linux. However, where it makes sense, Red Hat may opt to have MetaMatrix products take advantage of features specifically in Red Hat Enterprise Linux when they are deployed there and vice versa.
We expect customers will benefit from the simplicity, low-cost, and high-value of a more powerful open source architecture combining Red Hat Enterprise Linux, JBoss Enterprise Middleware, and MetaMatrix products. Specifically, we believe customers will receive:
All open invoices issued prior to the closing date should be paid per the agreed upon terms, which include the remittance party. After the closing date, Red Hat will be working towards providing customers one invoice per total order, even if that order includes a variety of products. More details on this process will be communicated in the future.
If you have more questions, email metamatrixquestions@redhat.com.