Red Hat snaps up Polymita’s BPM platform to bolster middleware portfolio

As their second big middleware purchase of 2012, Red Hat have snapped up the business-management platform from Barcelona-based firm Polymita, suggesting their next move lies in sprucing up jBPM.

Red Hat disclosed reasons for the purchase of Polymita technology, revealing that it would allow them to “bring complementary BPM capabilities that are designed to improve the productivity of business users,” and more importantly the union would position them as a “leading vendor” in the BPM marketplace.

Although a specified product roadmap featuring Polymita solutions isn’t available, Red Hat did make it clear that their goal is to make the core open source – in keeping with their general strategy. The benefits of doing this are obvious: they want to pique the interest of their vast community, especially project leads. By presenting the technology as something that could aid everyone, and not just JBoss Enterprise BRMS and jBPM, they could be onto a winner.

Red Hat have long let the community know their intentions when it comes to middleware. Mark Little, who leads the technical direction, has spoke in the past of how they see it driving innovation in the future.

They recognise the importance of having flexible middleware options, as it often spreads into the entire enterprise portfolio. They also realise how the term is changing to accommodate for mobile and cloud architectural changes.

It provides the glue that you can’t do without as a developer. Whether it’s the enterprise service bus, enterprise application integration or something message oriented, middleware should never be forgotten about.

Over recent months, we’ve seen Red Hat go on an assault to acquire as many middleware specialists as they can to firm up their enterprise options – namely the jewel in the crown, JBoss EAP. June’s purchase of FuseSource, the hugely successful providers of ActiveMQ and Apache Camel enterprise–tailored solutions, gave us a sign of things to come. Led by Groovy creator James Strachan, FuseSource made their name by being one of the most active contributors to Apache Software Foundation projects, becoming well respected in open source circles. Something which clearly entices the $1bn revenue generating Red Hat.

For the time being at least, Polymita customers will continue to receive support from Polymita themselves, with Red Hat to take control and supply a converged roadmap in due course.

Whilst this acquisition isn’t necessarily a surprising one given Big Red’s previous allure to tried and tested middleware specialists, we’re intrigued to see who is next in their hiring line.