Red Hat goes mobile with new app development platform

Red Hat is going mobile with a new suite of applications built around technology it acquired last fall with the purchase of FeedHenry. The Red Hat Mobile Application Platform is designed to help customers speed up, simplify and integrate app development.

Red Hat also plans to incorporate the technology into its “cloud” focused OpenShift Enterprise, including a “developer offering.

Raleigh-based Red Hat (NYSE: RHT) made the announcement Tuesday at its annual Summit in Boston.

“Red Hat is one of the only companies that can deliver and support the components needed to run the highly scalable workloads required by today’s digital business,” said Cathal McGloin, vice president of mobile platforms for Red Hat.

“The Red Hat Mobile Application Platform delivers vital mobile capabilities and secure, manageable integration with enterprise systems from a single, trusted, and award winning provider of enterprise middleware, cloud, and mobile solutions.”

Red Hat bought Ireland-based FeedHenry for $82 million last fall, and an executive told WTW then that the time had come for the Hatters to go mobile.

The FeedHenry technology is being incorporated into Red Hat’s JBoss Middleware and OpenShift PaaS [platform as a service] portfolio, and adds new mobile services.

“The platform offers enterprises a full technology stack to enable mobile-centric workloads to integrate with existing IT infrastructures, reducing the complexity and increasing agility across mobile development and deployment cycles,” Red Hat said in the announcement.

“The Red Hat Mobile Application Platform provides mobile capabilities that include security, reusable connections to back-end systems, and collaborative/agile app development. In extending highly complex and sophisticated applications to mobile devices, Red Hat believes that the defining factors of the next generation of PaaS capabilities will be a rich set of middleware services. In bringing the Mobile Application Platform to OpenShift, Red Hat aims to position itself for this and further advance the Red Hat xPaaS services vision.”