Red Hat said Tuesday it has signed a definitive agreement to acquire the business of MetaMatrix Inc., a provider of data management and integration software.

Once the transaction is completed, in approximately 60 days, MetaMatrix will be integrated into Red Hat's JBoss division, said Tim Yeaton, senior vice president of enterprise solutions at Red Hat, on a conference call with reporters.

Privately held, venture-backed MetaMatrix, of Waltham, Mass., offers data management software for SOA applications. Red Hat did not disclose terms of its acquisition.

SOA is an approach to modernizing legacy IT infrastructures, providing interoperability across applications and software components. But SOA alone does not resolve data-access challenges among different physical data sources, Yeaton said. MetaMatrix addresses the problem with a data services layer that decouples applications from their data sources, freeing data from single application silos.

"That's true regardless of what type of data it is, where it exists, its structure and what have you," Yeaton said. "The net benefit is that customers are able to really free their data assets from the siloed application-dependent ways that application databases have been constructed in the past."

The data-management market is estimated to reach US$1.3 billion in 2007, he said, citing a figure from Forrester Research Inc.

Red Hat, whose software is based on the open source Linux kernel, announced the MetaMatrix acquisition as part of a series of announcements about its JBoss product strategy. Red Hat acquired JBoss for $420 million in 2006. JBoss is a Java-based application server software platform.

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