Red Hat, Inc. significantly made sets to better support its customers with mobile requirements with the acquisition of FeedHenry, a Waterford, Ireland-based an enterprise mobile application platform provider.
The all-cash deal has been reported to be just north of $80 million and may help to expand Red Hat’s portfolio of application development, integration, and Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) solutions. With FeedHenry Red Hat can now support more mobile application development in public and private environments.
According to Red Hat, enterprises continue to embrace mobile devices as the preferred way to engage and interact with customers, employees, and partners, and new enterprise application software development is increasingly focused on supporting mobile apps and devices.
IDC expects 1.2 billion smartphones to ship this year, representing 19.3 per cent growth over 2013. The thought here is that cloud-based mobile application platforms such as FeedHenry enable enterprises to support enterprise mobile applications at scale – with centralized security, notification and integration services. IDC also predicts the mobile application platform market will grow 38.7 per cent compound annual growth rate (CAGR) from $1.4 billion in 2013 to $4.8 billion by 2017.
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After 20 years of Linux, the company based in Raleigh, N.C., in the last two years has acquired Inktank’s flagship product the Inktank Ceph Enterprise to delivers object and block storage, In June of this year, Red Hat acquired eNovance, an open source cloud services vendor based in Paris, France, for approximately 70 million Euros. The company also bought FuseSource, PolyMita and ManageIQ. In 2011, the company made a major acquisition of Gluster for software defined storage. All this effort resulted in Red Hat becoming the top contributor for OpenStack in building their own private cloud.
The company plans to align its open hybrid cloud strategy with FeedHenry to enable enterprises to accelerate mobile app development and backend integration via private clouds, public clouds, and on-premises. FeedHenry will make an important addition to Red Hat’s JBoss xPaaS for OpenShift strategy, said one company official, providing a platform and services for mobile developers and applications.
Gartner research director Richard Marshall said building and deploying useful mobile apps is rapidly becoming a top concern for IT, as mobile apps bring competitive advantages to most businesses through improved information flow, faster decision making and ubiquitous access to key resources.
FeedHenry was founded in 2010 as a spin out from the Telecommunications Software and Systems Group at the Waterford Institute of Technology in Ireland. It has an open and extensible architecture based on Node.js for client and server side mobile app development.
Cathal McGloin, CEO of FeedHenry said the company has embraced open technologies and the cloud for mobile development and management and are excited to become part of Red Hat. This deal is a 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,” he said.