Red Hat Acquires FeedHenry for Mobile Dev

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Red Hat’s JBoss developer tools division has always focused on enterprise development, but hasn’t always been focused on mobile. Today that will start to change as Red Hat announced its intention to acquire mobile development vendor FeedHenry for $82 million in cash. The deal is set to close in the third quarter of Red Hat’s fiscal 2015. Red Hat is set to disclose its second quarter fiscal 2015 earning at 4 ET today.

Mike Piech, general manager of Middleware at Red Hat, told Datamation that upon the deal’s closing FeedHenry’s employees will become Red Hat employees.

FeedHenry’s development platform enables application developers to rapidly build mobile application for Android, IOS, Windows Phone and BlackBerry. The FeedHenry platform leverages Node.js programming architecture, which is not an area where JBoss has had much exposure in the past.

“The acquisition of FeedHenry significantly expands Red Hat’s support for and engagement in Node.js,” Piech said.

Piech Red Hat’s OpenShift Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) technology already has a Node.js cartridge. Additionally Red Hat Enterprise Linux ships a tech preview of node.js as part of the Red Hat Software Collections.

While node.js itself is open source, not all of FeedHenry’s technology is currently available under an open source license. As has been Red Hat’s policy throughout its entire history, it is now committing to making FeedHenry open source as well.

“As we’ve done with other acquisitions, open sourcing the technology we acquire is a priority for Red Hat, and we have no reason to expect that approach will change with FeedHenry,” Piech said.

Red Hat’s last major acquisition of a company with non open source technology was with ManageIQ for $104 million back in 2012. In May of this year, Red Hat launched the ManageIQ open-source project, opening up development and code of the formerly closed-source cloud management technology.

From an integration standpoint, Red Hat is not yet providing full details of precisely where FeedHenry will fit it.

“We’ve already identified a number of areas where FeedHenry and Red Hat’s existing technology and products can be better aligned and integrated,” Piech said. “We’ll share more details as we develop the roadmap over the next 90 days.”

Sean Michael Kerner is a senior editor at Datamation and InternetNews.com. Follow him on Twitter @TechJournalist

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