Red Hat to Acquire Enterprise Cloud Management Vendor ManageIQ

Red Hat will be getting a new acquisition in its stocking this year. The company has signed a definitive agreement to acquire ManageIQ, a vendor that provides enterprise cloud management and automation products that aid organizations in deploying, managing and optimizing their private clouds, virtualized infrastructure and virtualized desktops.

The acquisition of ManageIQ will add the company’s Hybrid Cloud Operations Management Tools products to Red Hat’s growing portfolio of cloud computing products, which currently includes Red Hat CloudForms and Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization. The ManageIQ products provide operational management tools like monitoring, chargeback, governance and orchestration across virtual and cloud infrastructure such as Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization, Amazon Web Services, Microsoft and VMware.

Red Hat will acquire ManageIQ for approximately $104 million in cash. As usual, the closing of the transaction is subject to customary closing conditions and approval by ManageIQ’s stockholders.

Red Hat has been incredibly busy in the cloud space over the last few months. It made an update to its open hybrid cloud management platform earlier this month and launched a new OpenShift Enterprise PaaS aimed at enterprises at the end of November. Earlier this year, when the skies were blue and the temperatures were higher, the company also unveiled its own OpenStack distribution.

As for ManageIQ, the company expanded its scope beyond the enterprise private cloud by opening up its EVM management platform to include public cloud services. When it launched into the public cloud space, its first supported public cloud platform was Amazon Web Services. By the end of the year, ManageIQ planned to support Rackspace, as well. What this acquisition will mean for EVM and its support of various public cloud services is unknown, and Red Hat seems focused on the private cloud and virtualized infrastructure and desktop management capabilities.

“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,” said Paul Cormier, president of products and technologies at Red Hat, in a prepared statement.