Red Hat To Buy Cloud Management Expert ManageIQ

Open source specialists Red Hat have entered into a definitive agreement to acquire the US cloud and virtualisation management company ManageIQ, for approximately $104 million (£64m) in cash.

The deal will enable Red Had to offer new cloud management tools as part of its open source product portfolio.

Red Hat’s shopping cart

Headquartered in Mahwah, New Jersey, ManageIQ provides scalable enterprise-grade cloud management solutions, with unified monitoring and automation capabilities. These solutions, built on the company’s Adaptive Management Platform, are designed specifically to be used with virtualised infrastructure.

As an existing member of the Red Hat Enterprise Virtualisation Certified Partner programme, ManageIQ has worked closely with its new owner. Its Hybrid Cloud Operations Management technologies complement Red Hat’s existing cloud and virtualisation tools – Red Hat CloudForms and Red Hat Enterprise Virtualisation.

In the near future, Red Hat will start offering ManageIQ’s Hybrid Cloud Operations Management Tools, to provide mechanisms for monitoring, chargeback, governance and orchestration across virtual and cloud infrastructure, to be used with services from Amazon, Microsoft and VMware.

“Industry and customer response to Red Hat’s vision for the open hybrid cloud has been overwhelmingly positive because it offers the best of both worlds: the ability to tap into the public cloud when and where it makes sense, while leveraging existing investments for cloud infrastructure,” explained Paul Cormier, president of products and technologies at Red Hat.

“For enterprise cloud initiatives, effective cloud management is critical. ManageIQ offers robust features, including orchestration, policy, workflow, monitoring and chargeback, that deepen Red Hat’s cloud management capabilities and bring the promise of open hybrid cloud a step closer for the industry.”

The acquisition is expected to have no material impact to Red Hat’s revenue for its fiscal year ending in February 2013. The company has just published its financial results for the quarter ending in November, that show an 18 percent increase in revenue year-on-year.

“Since October of last year we have completed three acquisitions, and are announcing a fourth today to expand our portfolio of open source solutions and enlarge our addressable market. As our enterprise customers move to open, hybrid cloud architectures, we are addressing their needs with a clear roadmap based on industry-leading open source technologies,” said Jim Whitehurst, president and chief executive officer of Red Hat.

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