Red Hat to Acquire French OpenStack Cloud Firm eNovance for €70M

Red Hat has agreed to acquire eNovance, a privately-held OpenStack-oriented company that helps service providers and enterprises build clouds, for approximately €50 million in cash and €20 million in shares of Red Hat common stock.

The French company, with whom Red Hat has a history of collaboration, has made a lot of contributions to the OpenStack, the open source cloud architecture, and the acquisition would merge two of the top ten contributors. eNovance brings systems integration capabilities and engineering talent to Red Hat.

The transaction is expected to close in June 2014.

OpenStack continues to gain traction as startups and enterprise service providers alike continue to partner, innovate and contribute to the project. Red Hat has made several OpenStack-related moves this year, maintaining a leadership position in the ecosystem.

eNovance was founded in 2008 to help service providers and large scale enterprises build and deploy cloud infrastructures. The company helps several organization manage a multitude of customer web applications on public clouds wordwide.

It has more than 150 global customers, including Alcatel-Lucent, AXA, Cisco, Cloudwatt and Ericsson, and offices in Paris, Montreal, and Bangalore.

Red Hat Linux OpenStack-centered partnership

Red Hat and eNovance first partnered in 2013 to deliver OpenStack implementation and integration services to joint customers, helping accelerate adoption of the Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform.

The companies expanded collaboration this year to drive Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) and telecommunications innovations into OpenStack. The aim was delivering complete carrier-grade telecommunications offerings.

“eNovance, like Red Hat, understands the transformative power OpenStack can have on the enterprise market when it is both deployed and integrated in the right fashion,” said Raphaël Ferreira, co-founder CEO at eNovance.

The acquisition further boosts Red Hat’s OpenStack positioning. In 2014, Red Hat has made several open source infrastructure moves, including acquisition of Ink Tank, the company behind Ceph, the open source distributed object store and file system, and its enterprise support, an OpenStack-oriented partnership with Dell and Telefonica, a strengthened alliance with Hortonworks, provider of the popular enterprise distribution of Apache Hadoop, and innovation in the hot application container space.

The company has also announced a one-stop cloud shop called OpenShift marketplace.