Open source vendor RedHat has announcement an agreement to buy DevOps specialist Ansible, which creates agentless automation systems designed to simplify the automation of pure and across hybrid cloud environments.
The upstream Ansible open source automation projects on GitHub have an active community of 1,200 contributors and Ansible automation is used by Fortune 100 companies to power large and complex private cloud environments. In 2015 it was granted the InfoWorld Bossie Award in recognition of being the best open source datacentre and cloud software on the market.
Ansible removes some of the most significant barriers to automation across IT, according to Joe Fitzgerald vice president of management at Red Hat. Adding Ansible to Red Hat’s hybrid management portfolio means customers can install and manage cloud applications more easily, use DevOps to improve service delivery, streamline OpenStack projects and make container adoption much easer to orchestrate and configure.
Acquiring the top IT automation and DevOps company will take Red Hat significantly closer to frictionless IT, according to Fitzgerald, but innovation has to be 100 per cent open source and built on open management. “Ansible can help us relentlessly focus on reducing cost and complexity through ease of use and automation,” said Fitzgerald.
The addition of Ansible to Red Hat’s portfolio puts it at the forefront of cloud and DevOps, according to venture capitalist Doug Carlisle, MD of Menlo Ventures.
The acquisition, which will close in October if all conditions are met, won’t affect Red Hat’s revenue for the third and fourth quarters of its fiscal year ending on February 29, 2016. The terms of the deal were not disclosed, but VentureBeat reckons the price was over $100 million.
Management expects that non-GAAP operating expenses for fiscal 2016 will increase by approximately $2.0 million, or ($0.01) per share, in the third quarter and approximately $4.0 million, or ($0.02) per share, in the fourth quarter as a result of the transaction.
According to researcher IDC’s analysis in July 2015, the global cloud systems management software market achieved total revenue of $2.3 billion in 2014. The market is currently forecast to grow to $8.3 billion in 2019.