Red Hat to Acquire FeedHenry for $84 MillionRed Hat to Acquire FeedHenry for $84 Million

Open source solutions provider Red Hat (RHT) signed an agreement to acquire enterprise mobile application platform provider FeedHenry, the company announced today. The acquisition will allow Red Hat to grow its portfolio of application development, integration and platform-as-a-service (PaaS) solutions and support the company’s burgeoning mobile application development efforts.

The acquisition, which cost Red Hat approximately 63.5 million Euros, or $84.04 million USD, is expected to close during Q3 of fiscal year 2015. Red Hat expects the acquisition to allow for expansion within the mobile application platform sphere, which is expected to grow 38.7 percent CAGR to $4.8 billion in 2017 from $1.4 billion in 2013, according to IDC.

“The mobile application platform is one of the fastest growing segments of the enterprise software market,” said Craig Muzilla, senior vice president, Application Platform Business, Red Hat, in a statement. “FeedHenry will help us enable customers to take advantage of the capabilities of mobile with the security, scalability and reliability of Red Hat enterprise software."

FeedHenry will work with Red Hat to enable enterprises to accelerate their mobile development and backend integration via private clouds, public clouds and on-premise storage, according to the press release. FeedHenry’s integration into the Red Hat portfolio is expected to complement the company’s JBoss xPaaS for OpenShift strategy by providing a platform and services for mobile developers and applications.

FeedHenry was founded in 2010 and has architecture based on Node.js for client- and server-side mobile app development, which allows developers to create native, hybrid HTML5 or web apps, according to the company.

“Since our inception, FeedHenry has embraced open technologies and the cloud for mobile development and management,” said Cathal McGloin, chief executive officer at FeedHenry. “We are excited to become part of Red Hat, the leader in open source enterprise solutions, and see this as confirmation of the combined power of mobile and cloud, the mass-market adoption of mobile application and MBaaS platforms, and the growing popularity of Node.js. By joining Red Hat, we now have an opportunity to bring our leading mobile application platform to a wider audience of global customers and partners, to help them optimize for the mobile-first world.”