Red Hat Acquires ManageIQ Cloud Management

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Red Hat is expanding its cloud portfolio with the acquisition of ManageIQ. The deal is valued at $104 million and brings new cloud operations management technology to Red Hat.

“ManageIQ brings an adaptive and integrated approach to important cloud management capabilities such as server and storage provisioning, workload optimization, policy-based compliance, charge-back, virtual machine life cycle management, discovery and control and analytics,” Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst said during the company’s earnings call. “ManageIQ’s technology combines well with the direction that we are headed in developing cloud management for open hybrid clouds.”

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Bryan Che, general manager of the Cloud Business Unit at Red Hat told Datamation that the addition of ManageIQ is all about bringing operational management to the cloud.

Che stressed that ManageIQ is complementary to Red Hat’s existing cloud efforts. For example, users of Red Hat’s CloudForms or Enterprise Virtualization solutions can benefit from ManageIQ by adding in chargeback, governance, compliance and orchestration capabilities.

Joe Fitzgerald, Chief Product Officer and co-founder of ManageIQ told Datamationthat his company was really looking to build out its sales channel. He noted that ManageIQ had already been partnering with Red Hat and there is no product overlap.

“So instead of us building our own channels, we decided that this was the right time and it’s really a fantastic combination,” Fitzgerald said.

Fitzgerald explained that the way the ManageIQ solution works is that it is a virtual appliance and that can automatically discover infrastructure assets. With that knowledge the system can then be implemented to enforce policy.

Open Source

ManageIQ is not an open source technology, but under Red Hat’s direction that will change.

Che noted that it is Red Hat’s intention to open source ManageIQ over time. As a company, Red Hat has acquired a number of propriety technologies over the years that were eventually open sourced. The most recent example is Red Hat’s OpenShift Platform as-a-Service technology which was originally based on technology from the company’s acquisition of Meraki.

Che noted that in the near term the ManageIQ technology will be sold as a standalone offerings. In the longer term the plan is to achieve tighter integration with the rest of Red Hat’s cloud portfolio and in particular CloudForms. CloudForms was recently updated to version 1.1 providing hybrid cloud management capabilities.

As Red Hat takes control of ManageIQ, the challenge for Red Hat will be to scale up and get the product into the right sales channels.

“ManageIQ has been a small startup and has executed well in its few years of operation,” Che said. “We’ve got a lot of excitement at Red Hat around building open hybrid clouds, but from an execution standpoint there is a whole lot of work that we have to get through.”

Sean Michael Kerner is a senior editor at InternetNews.com, the news service of the IT Business Edge Network, the network for technology professionals Follow him on Twitter @TechJournalist.