Red Hat has shelled out €70 million to buy French OpenStack systems integrator eNovance, most famous for designing the Cloudwatt French national cloud.
Based in Paris, eNovance started in 2008 and resides in the top 10 list of contributors to the OpenStack public cloud project. Firms such as Cisco, Ericsson and Alcatel-Lucent are some of its customers.
According to the statement, Red Hat will pay €50m in cash and €20 in shares for the French company.
The move is expected to help Red Hat expand its capabilities in OpenStack technology.
Red Hat said in a statement: "Combined with Red Hat’s existing leadership in OpenStack, the addition of eNovance’s systems integration capabilities and engineering talent is aimed at meeting growing demand for enterprise OpenStack consulting, design and deployment.
"As noted by IDC analysts Laura DuBois and Ashish Nadkarni in their recent recap of the spring 2014 OpenStack Summit, "Integrators such as eNovance will continue to assist cloud service providers and enterprises in building large OpenStack clouds. The future for OpenStack is looking very bright. The next Summit in Paris, France, will take OpenStack to the next phase of its fascinating journey to become a de facto cloud OS."
The two companies first struck up a partnership in 2013 to deliver OpenStack implementation and integration services to some of their joint customers.
Boris Renski, CEO at Mirantis, told CBR: "OpenStack technology has really gained momentum in the cloud sector in 2014 giving companies that want the flexibility to have their own cloud infrastructure without: A) building it themselves or B) using Amazon Web Services . There have been several key factors in this including the co-operation between some of the industry’s biggest competitors, including Mirantis and Canonical, to deliver a truly open solution to the market.
"This has been accelerated by innovative products coming into the market such as our recently launched OpenStack Express, a pay as you go, private cloud-as-a-service solution. This enables customers to select from a menu how big an OpenStack cloud they want, which data centre they want it to run in, and where they want it deployed, then pay as they go."
