Red Hat to acquire IT automation and devops leader Ansible

Red Hat, Inc., the Raleigh, NC-based leading provider of open source solutions, announced on October 16 that it has signed a definitive agreement to acquire Ansible, Inc., a provider of powerful IT automation solutions designed to help enterprises move toward frictionless IT. Ansible’s automation capabilities, together with Red Hat’s existing management portfolio, will help users drive down the cost and complexity of deploying and managing both cloud-native and traditional applications across hybrid cloud environments. With today’s announcement, Red Hat expands its leadership in hybrid cloud management, OpenStack and containers.

Ansible’s simple and agentless approach, unlike competing solutions, does not require any special coding skills, removing some of the most significant barriers to automation across IT. From deployment and configuration to rolling upgrades, by adding Ansible to its hybrid management portfolio, Red Hat will help customers to:

• Deploy and manage applications across private and public clouds.
• Speed service deliverythrough DevOps initiatives.
• Streamline OpenStack installations and upgrades.
• Accelerate container adoption by simplifying orchestration and configuration.

The upstream Ansible project is one of the most popular open source automation projects on GitHub with an active and highly engaged community, encompassing nearly 1,200 contributors. Ansible automation is being used by a growing number of Fortune 100 companies, powering large and complex private cloud environments, and the company has received several notable accolades, including a 2015 InfoWorld Bossie Award, recognizing the best open source datacenter and cloud software.

With the addition of Ansible, Red Hat’s open hybrid cloud and IT management solutions will include:

• Red Hat CloudForms, an open management platform that provides orchestration, governance and policy-based control across hybrid clouds enabling self-service provisioning, and resource management as well as quota enforcement, metering and chargeback.
• Red Hat Satellite, a comprehensive lifecycle management solution with integrated infrastructure provisioning, software distribution, patch management and auditing capabilities.
• Ansible and Ansible Tower, an IT automation and DevOps platform that provides significantly simplified multi-tier application deployment and IT automation across hybrid clouds.

The transaction is expected to close in October 2015, subject to customary closing conditions.

Source: Red Hat, Inc.