Red Hat is acquiring Ireland-based FeedHenry in a deal worth some $82 million in cash. FeedHenry focuses on mobile enterprise application development.

The deal thus enables Red Hat to move into the wireless enterprise space and further expand its cloud computing efforts..

  • (Why did Red Hat do the deal? A top exec explains.)

The deal was announced early Thursday. It’s the second acquisition Red Hat has made in Europe in recent months. Red Hat agreed to acquire a French cloud computing firm in June.

Red Hat (NYSE: RHT) releases its quarterly earnings report today after the markets close.

Craig Muzilla, senior vice president of Application Platform Business at Red Hat, said the deal enables Red Hat to capitalize on the growing acceptance of mobile devices and expand its capabilities to support cloud computing,

“The mobile application platform is one of the fastest growing segments of the enterprise software market. As mobile devices have penetrated into every aspect of enterprise computing, enterprise software customers are looking for easier and more efficient ways for their developers to build mobile applications that extend and enhance traditional enterprise applications. FeedHenry will help us enable customers to take advantage of the capabilities of mobile with the security, scalability, and reliability of Red Hat enterprise software.”

Deal FAQ

In an FAQ about the deal, Red Hat spelled out its thinking behind the deal:

“Mobile computing is changing the way enterprises conduct business and engage with their employees, partners, and customers. It is a rapidly growing segment of the information technology market and enterprises are looking for solutions that enable them to extend existing applications to mobile devices and to build new applications that embrace mobile users from the beginning. FeedHenry is a natural fit with Red Hat’s strengths in enterprise middleware and Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS), allowing our customers to meet their growing mobile requirements.”

Further, Red Hat spelled out why it was interested in FeedHenry:

“Enterprises continue to embrace mobile devices and mobile apps (including native, mobile web, and hybrid apps) as a preferred way to engage with employees, partners and customers. As a result the majority of new enterprise application software development includes support for mobile devices. FeedHenry is a leader in cloud-based enterprise mobile application platforms and has deep expertise in meeting the mobile application development needs of enterprises. With FeedHenry, Red Hat will be able to support customers’ end-to-end mobile application development, integration and management needs – at enterprise scale.”

FeedHenry, which has 65 employees, was founded in 2010 as a spinout from the Waterford Institute of Technology. It has offices in Ireland, the United Kingdom and Burlington, Mass.

FeedHenry’s Reaction

Cathal McGloin, chief executive officer of FeedHenry, said his firm has a history of commitment to open source.

“Since our inception, FeedHenry has embraced open technologies and the cloud for mobile development and management,” he said in a statement. “We are excited to become part of Red Hat, the leader in open source enterprise solutions, and see this as confirmation of the combined power of mobile and cloud, the mass-market adoption of mobile application and MBaaS platforms, and the growing popularity of Node.js. By joining Red Hat, we now have an opportunity to bring our leading mobile application platform to a wider audience of global customers and partners, to help them optimize for the mobile-first world.”

MBaaS refers to “mobile backend as a service.”

Red Hat plans to integrate FeedHenry products into its own cloud and “platform as a a service” offerings.

The deal is expected to close in coming months.

Red Hat, the global leader in open source Linux software development and solutions, is based in Raleigh.