Red Hat Acquires Makara for Cloud Computing Initiative

Red Hat has acquired Makara, which develops software for managing applications in the cloud. The move could strengthen Red Hat’s Cloud Foundations, platform as a service (PaaS) and virtualization strategies. And yes, there are some key implications for channel partners as well. Here’s The VAR Guy’s perspectives.

According to the official Red Hat statement:

“Makara provides solutions to enable organizations to deploy, manage, monitor and scale their applications on both private or public clouds. Customers facing issues in moving applications to the cloud and managing them efficiently can benefit from Makara’s solutions for scaling, rightsizing, rollback and monitoring. By integrating the JBoss Enterprise Middleware infrastructure with Makara’s Cloud Application Platform, Red Hat can offer a more comprehensive PaaS solution that allows organizations to quickly transition their applications to both public and private clouds with minimal modifications.”

Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.

The Bigger Picture

In some ways, Red Hat acquiring Makara resembles Novell’s Intelligent Workload Management strategy, which strives to help partners and customers to manage physical, virtual and cloud systems.

Red Hat’s buyout of Makara involves a bit of irony. During portions of 2009, some pundits thought Red Hat was an obvious takeover target because of the open source company’s sagging stock price. Fast forward to the present and Red Hat shares are trading near a 52-week high. The reason: Customers seem to believe in Red Hat’s ability to push beyond Linux. Indeed, the company has successfully diversified into middleware (JBoss) and virtualization (Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization, built atop KVM).

Now, Red Hat is trying to tie all of its solutions together via Cloud Foundations — an open source cloud stack that includes the operating system, middleware and virtualization. In theory, Makara could make it easier for VARs, managed services providers and cloud services providers to manage the Cloud Foundations stack.

Still, acquisitions can be tricky to manage. When Red Hat acquired JBoss, it took more than a year for Red Hat to really unlock the value of the open source middleware platform.

With the current Makara acquisition, Red Hat does not have the luxury of time. Dozens of companies large and small are building or acquiring cloud management tools. And open source cloud platforms such as OpenStack (promoted by Rackspace and NASA) and Eucalyptus also are vying for attention.

Can Red Hat rise above all the noise… again? The VAR Guy’s private bet: Yes.

Disclosure: The VAR Guy owns fewer than 250 shares in Red Hat stock.

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