Industry News Desk

Shades of IBM Global Services! Red Hat has bought itself a Virginia-based consulting firm that it will run as an independent Red Hat company - its first - to help it exploit its JBoss middleware acquisition.

Red Hat hasn't disclosed what it's spent buying Amentra but it needs to make money off its $350 million JBoss acquisition.

Amentra, by the way, is reportedly profitable with engagements that run from, say, $50,000 for a proof-of-concept to a million dollars. Its 40 clients include Circuit City, Verizon, Capital One and Merck.

Amentra, which is not an open source company in terms of giving anything away for free, is supposed to be good at providing systems integration services for SOA, business process management, systems development and enterprise data solutions.

It is also supposed to know a lot about JBoss and should provide, as Red Hat puts it, "a solutions-oriented depth to the JBoss middleware business."

Amentra however won't be restricted to simply pushing JBoss widgetry, according to Red Hat middleware chief Craig Muzilla. It could as easily suggest WebLogic, WebSphere or (gulp!) .NET.

Red Hat says it didn't have Amentra's kind of core competency in-house although it has recently recruited some 20 SIs that it expects to stick around.

The Amentra acquisition is supposed to complement Red Hat's shiny new Enterprise Acceleration initiative targeted at getting the enterprise to see Red Hat as a BPM and SOA purveyor and use JBoss - not to mention the rest of the Red Hat stack.

Amentra got started in 2000 and is now 140 strong out of six offices on the East Coast. It has a slick, reassuring web site, a slick, reassuring "mentoring" approach to consulting and, as you can see from the client list, has had a certain amount of success with the Fortune 500 and middle market.

Gartner's Hype Cycles recognizes it as a leading provider of open source services, SOA and legacy modernization; Forrester and Deloitte say nice things about it; and it was Ernst & Young's Entrepreneur of the Year last year. According to Deloitte, Amentra grew 518% between 2002 and 2006

Amentra's favorite verticals are finance, insurance, pharma and telecoms.