Red Hat Buys ManageIQ for Hybrid Cloud Management

ManageIQ will add much to Red Hat's growing portfolio. Its software enables organizations to deploy, manage and optimize private clouds--among other things.

Red Hat on Dec. 20 joined Oracle and Dell to announce holiday-season acquisitions of cloud-management software providers.

Cary, N.C.-based Red Hat, the world's highest-revenue commercial open-source software company, revealed that it is buying ManageIQ, a provider of enterprise cloud management and automation software, for about $104 million in cash.

Earlier this week, Dell bought cloud security vendor Credant and Oracle picked up Eloqua, which makes cloud-based marketing automation and revenue performance management software.

ManageIQ will add much to Red Hat's growing portfolio. Its software enables organizations to deploy, manage and optimize private clouds, virtualized infrastructures and virtual desktops from a single console. As a result, Red Hat soon will be expanding the capabilities of its enterprise hybrid cloud management platform.

Red Hat and ManageIQ have had a longstanding partnership to provide users with unified monitoring, management and automation packages. ManageIQ's Hybrid Cloud Operations Management technologies work tightly with Red Hat's existing cloud and virtualization management tools—Red Hat CloudForms and Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization—to offer integrated lifecycle management of data center activities.

These activities include server and storage provisioning, workload optimization, policy-based compliance, chargeback, virtual machine lifecycle management, discovery and control, and analytics across heterogeneous private clouds and virtualized data centers.

With the addition of Mahwah, N.J.-based ManageIQ, Red Hat's open hybrid cloud management solutions will include the following:

• Red Hat CloudForms: a hybrid cloud infrastructure as a service (IaaS) solution that enables the management, brokering, and aggregation of capacity across various virtualization and cloud providers as well as the management of applications across hybrid clouds.
• Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization: a comprehensive virtualization management solution that is an ideal virtualization substrate for organizations to build cloud environments in terms of performance, security and value.
• ManageIQ's Hybrid Cloud Operations Management Tools: a cloud operations management solution that provides enterprises with operational management tools, including monitoring, chargeback, governance, and orchestration across virtual and cloud infrastructure, such as Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization, Amazon Web Services, Microsoft and VMware.

The transaction is expected to close in the first quarter of 2013 and is subject to approval by the stockholders of ManageIQ.