Red Hat Aims To Extend Mobile Enterprise Reach With FeedHenry Acquisition

Red Hat Thursday said it signed a definitive agreement to acquire FeedHenry, an enterprise mobile application platform provider.

Under the terms of the agreement, Red Hat is set to acquire the privately held FeedHenry for 63.5 million Euros -- approximately $81.6 million U.S.-- in cash, as the amount is subject to adjustments at closing.

The move comes as Red Hat aims to broaden its reach into the ever-growing mobile enterprise space, enabling the Raleigh, N.C.-based company to support application development in public and private cloud environments. FeedHenry's cloud-based mobile application platform allows businesses to support mobile applications with centralized security, notifications and integration services. The company integrates with leading mobile application and device management solutions, including AirWatch and MobileIron.

"In the big picture, it's a good move for Red Hat," said Allen Falcon, CEO of Westborough, Mass.-based solution provider, Cumulus Global. "Business executives are doing more and more of their work on mobile devices, so having a platform to integrate apps into those devices is a good move. I think we're going to see continued and accelerating growth in mobile devices in business computing overall. That is where the largest portion of money is going to be on the mobile computing side."

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"The mobile application platform is one of the fastest-growing segments of the enterprise software market," said Craig Muzilla, Red Hat's senior vice president of application platform business, in a statement. "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."

By teaming up with Red Hat, FeedHenry's CEO said he sees the company's market increasing and its platform having further reach.

"Since our inception, FeedHenry has embraced open technologies and the cloud for mobile development and management," said FeedHenry CEO Cathal McGloin, in a statement. "We are excited to become part of Red Hat, the leader in open-source enterprise solutions, and see this as confirmation of the combined power of mobile and cloud, the mass-market adoption of mobile application and MBaaS platforms, and the growing popularity of Node.js. By joining Red Hat, we now have an opportunity to bring our leading mobile application platform to a wider audience of global customers and partners, to help them optimize for the mobile-first world."

Research firm IDC said it predicts 1.2 billion smartphones will ship in 2014, an increase of 19.3 percent from 2013. With that growth, the mobile enterprise will expand as well. IDC predicts the mobile application platform market will grow 38.7 percent from $1.4 billion in 2013 to $4.8 billion by 2017.

PUBLISHED SEPT. 18, 2014