Red Hat Acquires FeedHenry To Move Into The Mobile Space

It’s been a big day in tech news – Larry Ellison (kind of) stepping down from the CEO role at Oracle . SAP acquiring Concur. Amongst those big events, the modest acquisition of a mobile backend vendor by Red Hat didn’t really rate.

But Red Hat acquiring FeedHenry is actually interesting. FeedHenry is a mobile development platform that competes with vendors such as Parse, Kinvey, Appcelerator and many others. The idea of all of these vendors is that, with the world moving increasingly to mobile software, solutions that help organizations build and deploy mobile apps are increasingly valuable. FeedHenry, an Ireland-based startup, was funded back in 2010 and had only done a single round of investment – raising $9 million from Intel Capital, VMware and others. Red Hat is paying €63.5 million ($82 million) in cash for FeedHenry. The deal is expected to close in Q3.

FeedHenry counts Aer Lingus, Baystate Health and O2 as customers. Cathal McGloin (just in case there was any doubt about them being a genuinely Irish company) is a friendly industry executive who seems to have done well out of this deal. Both FeedHenry and Red Hat are based around open source software. FeedHenry had previously announced a strategy that saw it embrace Red Hat’s Platform as a Service offering, OpenShift. This deal is, therefore, a fairly natural one.

FeedHenry’s architecture is based on Node.js and offers development on Android, iOS, Windows Phone and BlackBerry apps, as well as hybrid, HTML5 and web apps. As far as application development, the FeedHenry platform supports native SDKs, hybrid Apache Cordova, HTML5 and Titanium, as well as Xamarin, Sencha Touch, and other frameworks.

The deal makes absolute sense from a broader strategy persepctive – Microsoft is strongly advocating a mobile strategy (and, in my view, will acquire Xamarin before too long). VMware has formed strong bonds with Kinvey and Amazon Web Services has announced its own quasi-PaaS. Red Hat was left alone without a compelling story – this deal fills that hole. But some of the specifics are unknown. Commenting on a slightly confusing part of the deal, Kinvey CEO Sravish Sridhar said:

While Red Hat and FeedHenry are a curious match up (especially considering rival VMware was one of FeedHenry's original investors), Red Hat is clearly aiming to piece together an enterprise development platform for mobile applications. But FeedHenry primarily sells to lines of business and provides services to build apps on their technology, while, on the other hand, Red Hat's model has been to sell to enterprise IT, which requires a self-service platform (something FeedHenry doesn't currently provide). I'd be very interested to see if Red Hat is interested in building out a services team around FeedHenry and changing their strategy to sell to lines of business instead of enterprise IT. This is definitely a good first step for the industry – acknowledging there’s a piece of the enterprise mobile development puzzle missing – but it ultimately leaves a large chunk of the problem left un-resolved

Time will tell where Red Hat takes this one.