Red Hat Set to Integrate ManageIQ with CloudForms for Cloud Management

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Red Hat today announced that it has officially closed on the $104 million acquisition of ManageIQ. The deal was first announced in December of 2012.

With the deal now closed, Red Hat has revealed what it plans to do with ManageIQ. The roadmap includes merging the ManageIQ product and its capabilities into Red Hat CloudForms as well as open sourcing the technology.

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“We just paid $104 million for this company, but instead of keep the code proprietary, we’re a very strong believer in the power that open source brings to our customers,” Bryan Che, general manager of the Cloud Business Unit at Red Hat said. “We are committed to open source the ManageIQ technology and portfolio.”

In addition to open sourcing the ManageIQ technology, Che said that the plan is to fully integrate the capabilities and features of ManageIQ into Red Hat’s CloudForms hybrid cloud management platform. Che noted that in the near term, ManageIQ will remain a separate product. Long-term, it will be integrated into CloudForms and not remain a stand-alone product.

The integrated CloudForms ManageIQ product will be able to manage hybrid clouds across heterogeneous technologies from different cloud vendors. The platform will also be able to manage the lifecycle of systems and applications as they operate across the cloud.

CloudForms already has sophisticated capabilities in terms of building and managing hybrid cloud infrastructure. CloudForms hit its 1.0 release in June of 2012 and was updated to version 1.1 in December. One of the key components of CloudForms is the Apache Deltacloud open source project that enables the integration of diverse compute capacities into logical clouds.

At this point, Red Hat is still in the early process of planning the full integration and does not have firm dates for the delivery of the new integrated CloudForm product. Che stressed that overall there is extremely little overlap between what CloudForms does today and what ManageIQ will enable.

“ManageIQ is focused on the operational management of virtualized and cloud infrastructure, things such as monitoring, orchestration, analytics and chargeback,” Che said. “These are capabilities that we have not built out in CloudForms.”

In contrast, CloudForms to date has been focused on managing hybrid cloud infrastructure and aggregating the capacity.

“We think it’s a good fit in terms of how the two technologies come together,” Che said. “We really do focus on different kinds of things.”

Sean Michael Kerner is a senior editor at InternetNews.com, the news service of the IT Business Edge Network, the network for technology professionals Follow him on Twitter @TechJournalist.