Today IBM announced that it has an agreed to acquire Green Hat, a company that provides tools for building virtual environments for software quality assurance and testing. This follows the official launch of IBM’s platform-as-a-service and continues IBM’s developer-centric cloud strategy. Once the acquisition closes, Green Hat will become part of Rational, IBM’s line of QA tools. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Green Hats brings to the table tools that make it much faster to build testing environments. According to IBM’s announcement: “According to recent industry reports, software testing represents more than 50 percent of overall development costs, and testing teams often spend upwards of 30 percent of their time managing the complexity of the test environment.”

“The drive towards Agile development with higher frequency of testing and also testing earlier in the lifecycle is producing huge pressures on QA,” Michael Azoff, principal analyst at Ovum, wrote in an e-mail comment about the news. “Green Hat reduces the time to set up, run, and return back to neutral test labs and removes impediments to Agile processes in mission-critical, large scale projects.”

In particular, Green Hat offers tools for simulating components such as third-party software and APIs external to the applications being tested. Its GH Tester product supports IBM WebSphere MQ, SOA, BPM, SOAP, REST and more. This allows testers to evaluate integrations with other software and better simulate the production environment. This is particularly valuable for cloud and mobile application development, where testing must be done quickly and an application may run on a variety of platforms.

In addition to demonstrating IBM’s continued focus on developers, it shows how vendors need to branch into more areas of the application development lifecycle to create value for enterprises. We’ve seen a lot of innovation and focus on development stacks and application deployment thanks to the rise of PaaS providers and the DevOps movement. It’s time for other areas, such as testing, to get some attention.