Red Hat Buys FeedHenry for Mobile Dev Capabilities for OpenStack and OpenShift

Red Hat has acquired enterprise mobile application platform provider FeedHenry for €63.5 million cash (about $82 million) to further advance its mobile strategy and support of open hybrid cloud environments. The sale is expected to close in the third quarter of 2015.

The cloud-based mobile platform that FeedHenry provides gives companies the ability to scale mobile applications, with support for centralized security, notification and integration services.

Red Hat said FeedHenry complements its vision for the future of application development by attracting mobile application development to its OpenStack and OpenShift cloud offerings. Red Hat made several strides into OpenStack this year, acquiring French cloud firm eNovance, and introducing an integrated infrastructure OpenStack solution with Cisco.

Supporting the market growth and validation of its mobile strategy Red Hat points to predictions from IDC that show mobile application platform market growing at an 38.7-percent compound annual growth rate, from $1.4 billion in 2013 to $4.8 billion by 2017. Red Hat's strengths are in enterprise middleware, and the strong mobile capabilities from FeedHenry augment that nicely.

Additionally, FeedHenry brings with it a strong global customer base and mobile development expertise. FeedHenry is headquartered in Waterford, Ireland, with offices in UK and U.S. The company has had only one financing round of $9 million in 2013, which included participation by VMware and Intel Capital.

Red Hat plans to fold FeedHenry technologies into its JBoss xPaaS for OpenShift strategy, providing a platform and services for mobile developers and applications. The extensible architecture of FeedHenry simplifies backend integration to business systems, speeding app delivery with reusable connectors and plug-ins to common enterprise systems such as Salesforce.com, SAP, Oracle and more.

Red Hat noted that FeedHenry is a strong, secure and scalable platform that also integrates with mobile application and device management solutions, such as AirWatch and MobileIron.

Craig Muzilla, senior vice president of application platform business at Red Hat, said, "As mobile devices have penetrated into every aspect of enterprise computing, enterprise software customers are looking for easier and more efficient ways for their developers to build mobile applications that extend and enhance traditional enterprise applications. FeedHenry will help us enable customers to take advantage of the capabilities of mobile with the security, scalability and reliability of Red Hat enterprise software."