FAQ: Red Hat Acquires Ansible

On Oct. 16, 2015, Red Hat announced that it has signed a definitive agreement to acquire Ansible, Inc. The acquisition is subject to certain customary closing conditions.

Q. How many people are employed by Ansible and where are they located?

Ansible has approximately 50 employees worldwide, and the company is headquartered in Durham, N.C.

Q. What does Ansible do?

Broadly, Ansible offers an IT automation and DevOps platform that provides dramatically simplified automation and integration capabilities.

To clarify the different aspects of Ansible:

• Ansible is a popular open source project designed to bring together administrators and developers of all kinds to collaborate on building IT automation solutions that increase business agility.

• Ansible Tower is a commercial product that provides the user-interface to centrally execute and monitor Ansible playbooks across a complex enterprise IT environment. Ansible Tower provides role-based access control, credentials management, delegation of jobs, compliance, and many other higher-level management features critical to a successful deployment of Ansible in an enterprise.

• Ansible is supported and sponsored by Ansible, Inc., the company.

Q. Why Ansible?

We see in Ansible a perfect alignment with the core principles that shape Red Hat’s management, both at the product level and at the portfolio level.

At the product level, Ansible matches Red Hat’s desire to deliver a frictionless design and a modular architecture through open development.

At the portfolio level, Ansible matches Red Hat’s desire to support a multi-tier architecture, provide multi-layer consistency, and deliver multi-vendor support.

See Alessandro Perilli’s blog post “Why did Red Hat acquire Ansible?” for more insight.

Q. Who uses Ansible today and what are the use cases where it shines?

Today, Ansible has more than 500 global customers and Ansible technology is used by a growing number of the Fortune 50, across all segments from financial services to retail.

Q. How does Ansible compete in today's market?

Ansible’s simple, agentless and modular approach to IT automation has propelled it to become one of the most popular open source IT automation project on Github in just three short years. Users love the fact that system administrators and developers can learn Ansible quickly and use it for everything from application deployment to configuration management to orchestration of multi-tier services across private and public clouds.

Q. How do Ansible’s products differentiate from and complement Red Hat’s current hybrid cloud management offerings?

Ansible's automation capabilities, together with Red Hat's existing management portfolio, can help users drive down the cost and complexity of deploying and managing both cloud-native and traditional applications across hybrid clouds.

With the addition of Ansible, Red Hat's open hybrid cloud and IT management solutions will include:

• Red Hat CloudForms, an open management platform that provides orchestration, governance and policy-based control across hybrid clouds enabling self-service provisioning, resource management as well as quota enforcement, metering and chargeback.

• Red Hat Satellite, a comprehensive lifecycle management solution with integrated infrastructure provisioning, software distribution, patch management and auditing capabilities.

• Ansible and Ansible Tower, an IT automation and DevOps platform that provides dramatically simplified multi-tier application deployment and IT automation across hybrid clouds.

Q. What are Red Hat’s plans with respect to Ansible’s existing commercial offerings?

Red Hat plans to continue to develop, sell and support Ansible and Ansible Tower. Ansible has an engaged and growing customer base, and Red Hat is committed to expanding and innovating to provide customers with high-value solutions based on Ansible.

Q. Will Red Hat open source all of Ansible's technology?

Most of Ansible is already open source today. Red Hat has long shown its commitment to open-sourcing the technology it acquires, and we have no reason to expect a change in this approach. Our specific plans and timeline will be determined over the coming months.

Q. Will Red Hat continue to foster the Ansible developer community?

Yes. Ansible maintains a highly engaged open source community as one of the most popular open source automation projects on GitHub, with more than 1,000 contributors. Additionally, in 2014, Ansible was named a top 10 open source project by opensource.com, and in September 2015, Ansible received an InfoWorld Bossie (Best of Open Source Software) Award as one of InfoWorld’s picks for the best open source datacenter and cloud software.

With Red Hat’s long history of successfully guiding open source communities for the benefit of all members, the Ansible community can feel confident in a continuation of the vital vibrant ecosystem Ansible, Inc. has built well into the future.

Q. What does this deal mean for existing Ansible customers?

Ansible will continue to honor client contracts and provide service and support as required. The combination of Ansible and Red Hat offers industry-leading IT automation technology, a broad portfolio of enterprise open source software, world-class support and an extended partner network.

Q. I’m an Ansible customer – who should I call for support?

Customers should contact Ansible for support as they did before the transaction, using https://support.ansible.com to file support tickets.

Q. What does this mean for existing Ansible partners?

Ansible and Red Hat share a deep commitment to their partners and the belief that partners are vital to our success. Red Hat looks forward to the opportunity to collaborate with Ansible’s partners.

Q. Ansible’s headquarters in Durham, N.C. are located near Red Hat’s headquarters in Raleigh, N.C. What are Red Hat’s plans for Ansible’s Durham presence?

Red Hat is committed to maintaining the Ansible office in Durham, N.C. During the transition period, Red Hat’s Global Workplace Solutions team will assess Ansible’s current office space and work with Ansible’s leadership team to determine how best to meet individual needs while accommodating expected growth plans.

Ansible’s proximity to Red Hat Tower, Red Hat’s headquarters in Raleigh, will enable close collaboration between teams, and expand our a footprint in the Raleigh-Durham community even further. Red Hat is excited to welcome Ansible’s associates to the company.

Q. Where can I get more information on this news?

• Press release: http://www.redhat.com/en/about/press-releases/red-hat-acquire-it-automation-and-devops-leader-ansible

• Blog - Why Red Hat acquired Ansible: http://www.redhat.com/en/about/blog/why-red-hat-acquired-ansible

• Webcast: Thursday, Oct. 22, 2015, at 11 a.m. EDT. (Replay available via the same link) https://vts.inxpo.com/Launch/QReg.htm?ShowKey=27948