Open source firm Red Hat has announced that it is buying two-year-old startup Ansible, a Santa Barbara company that provides enterprise clients a simplified way to build, deploy and manage cloud applications efficiently.
Red Hat is expected to complete the acquisition by the end of October. Financial terms were not disclosed, although sources say the deal fetched somewhere around $100 to $150 million. Ansible's 50 employees will move to Red Hat's North Carolina headquarters as part of the deal.
For a number of reasons, the acquisition is not surprising. Ansible, which has made a name for itself in developing software that automates cloud systems, apps and resources for enterprises, was founded by Red Hat veterans Said Ziouani and Michael DeHaan.
Moreover, Ansible's goal to provide a more streamlined method for programmers and developers and operations and IT people to work together to develop and deploy systems quickly and efficiently using Ansible Tower is in line with Red Hat's efforts to beef up its own DevOps offerings.
Ansible's Ansibleworks, an open source software that currently has more than 1,200 contributors on GitHub, is by itself free, but the company offers commercial support and eliminates the technical barriers that often prevent businesses from fully automating IT.
"Ansible's simple and agentless approach, unlike competing solutions, does not require any special coding skills, removing some of the most significant barriers to automation across IT," says Red Hat in a press release.
Red Hat says Ansible's platform will allow it to provide clients a way to deploy and manage apps in private and public clouds, enable faster delivery with DevOps initiatives, enable faster and more efficient OpenStack installations and upgrades, and simplify container adoption and configuration to encourage adoption by businesses, among others.
"Ansible is a clear leader in IT automation and DevOps, and helps Red Hat take a significant step forward in our goal of creating frictionless IT," says Joe Fitzgerald, vice president of management at Red Hat.
When the deal is complete, Ansible Tower will become part of Red Hat's portfolio of IT products, which include Red Hat CloudForms, an overall hybrid cloud management platform, and Red Hat Satellite, a provisioning and configuration solution with software distribution, patch management and audition capabilities.
Photo: Michael Pittman | Flickr
