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Green Hat, founded in 1996 and jointly headquartered in London and Wilmington, Del., essentially provides a lab environment in the cloud for developers and ISVs to conduct tests on their application ahead of the final delivery, according to the press release. That kind of test lab environment can take weeks or months and loads of cash to set up in a traditional arrangement, but Green Hat’s value proposition revolves around cutting both time and costs.

“This acquisition extends IBM’s leadership in driving business agility and software quality by changing the way enterprises can manage software development cost, test cycle time and risk. Together, we offer the most complete solution available today for agile software development and testing, with flexible options such as the cloud. Green Hat’s application virtualization capabilities will help our customers accelerate their delivery of business critical software,” said Kristof Kloeckner, general manager, IBM Rational, in a prepared statement.

As you may guess from Kloeckner’s diction, Green Hat will join IBM’s Rational Software division as a complement to the IBM Rational Solution for Collaborative Lifecycle Management product. While specifics aren’t given, the language in the release suggests that most, if not all, of Green Hat’s team will be remaining with the product under the IBM umbrella.

Together, IBM said, the combined forces of Rational and Green Hat will help developers “achieve unprecedented levels of efficiency, effectiveness and collaboration while delivering quality software to their business.” Meanwhile, customers benefit by “[maximizing] continuous integration of an application, including creating virtual protocols, message formats, services, customization and engagement with third-party software.”

Green Hat’s solution will also be available via IBM Global Business Services’ Application Management Services (AMS) division as a further enhancement of IBM’s professional services play.

This isn’t the first time IBM’s made an acquisition just to bolster its cloud play, and I doubt it’ll be the last — IBM has deep pockets. With this move, IBM swerves into competition with startups such CloudShare, which have built their businesses around similar value propositions. We’ll be watching closely, so stay tuned to TalkinCloud.