Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols| Zdnet
Today, anyone can set up a cloud. Managing it, though, is another story. So it came as no surprise last year, when Linux-giant Red Hat announced updates to its open hybrid cloud solutions portfolio, following the acquisition of ManageIQ, a leading provider of enterprise cloud management and automation solutions. In a statement, Bryan Che, Red Hat’s general manager of its Cloud Business Unit said, “We’ve worked with ManageIQ as a partner to our Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization platform with successful joint customers, and saw an opportunity to expand our hybrid cloud management capabilities with an even closer relationship with ManageIQ’s compelling portfolio.
With the closing of the acquisition, we now begin work to integrate ManageIQ’s enterprise cloud management and automation technologies with our complementary Red Hat Cloud Forms hybrid Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) solution and our open Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization management solution. With this combination, we can offer our customers an unparalleled open hybrid cloud management portfolio.”
What all this means is that you’ll be able to use ManageIQ management tools to manage, automate, and integrate the complete Red Hat cloud line.
Why did Red Hat make this move? That’s an easy one. Cloud management is still a real pain. As Mary Johnston Turner, IDC’s research vice president of Enterprise Systems Management, said in a statement, “As more and more production workloads are deployed across heterogeneous virtual, private cloud, and public cloud data-centers, IT buyers are prioritizing investments in management solutions that can automate and optimize end-to-end performance and capacity utilization across these complex environments.” And the ever important bottom line: “IDC expects spending on cloud systems management software to exceed $3.6 billion by 2016, thanks to demand for these types of sophisticated tools.”
Merging the two should be easy. Red Hat claims that besides the product lines already being complementary, Red Hat and ManageIQ already share many joint customers, and the majority of ManageIQ’s customers are also Red Hat customers.
If you’re already using Red Hat virtualization or cloud services, and you’re having trouble managing them, now is the time to check in with Red Hat to see if their new ManageIQ offerings can help you out.
