Red Hat Expands Cloud Management Offerings With Makara Acquisition

November 30, 2010, 12:22 PM EST

Red Hat, best known for its distribution of the Linux operating system and its open-source JBoss Enterprise Middleware, did not disclose the financial details of the acquisition of the Redwood City, Calif.-based Makara.

Red Hat's PaaS line of software is part of the vendor's Cloud Foundations portfolio, an open-source software stack incorporating operating system, middleware and virtualization technologies. Red Hat debuted Cloud Foundations in June.

"With today's announcement of the acquisition of Makara, Red Hat is delivering on its Cloud Foundations strategy," said Scott Crenshaw, vice president and general manager of Red Hat's cloud business unit, in a Web broadcast Tuesday. "Makara's technology will accelerate and enhance Red Hat Cloud Foundation PaaS."

Makara's tools help IT organizations deploy, manage, monitor and scale applications running on public and private cloud systems. Bringing those technologies into the Red Hat fold means the company will increasingly compete with established vendors such as CA Technologies and Novell that have been expanding into cloud application management and young companies such as AppDynamics.

"There's a lot of complexity in developing, provisioning, sizing, scaling, monitoring and managing applications, particularly when they need to be rock-solid and highly available," Crenshaw said. "We're changing that model and Red Hat is taking away that complexity."

As it has with other acquisitions, Red Hat will provide an open-source version of the Makara software, Crenshaw said.

Rick Whiting

Rick Whiting has been with CRN since 2006 and is currently a feature/special projects editor. Whiting manages a number of CRN’s signature annual editorial projects including Channel Chiefs, Partner Program Guide, Big Data 100, Emerging Vendors, Tech Innovators and Products of the Year. He also covers the Big Data beat for CRN. He can be reached at rwhiting@thechannelcompany.com.