ManageIQ and the Open Hybrid Cloud

Red Hat's recent acquisition of ManageIQ, a cloud management startup company based in New Jersey that has been operating since 2006, is a tremendously exciting event for our customers, partners, and Red Hat's mission to deliver open hybrid cloud.

Now that we have closed our purchase of ManageIQ, here are some of my thoughts of why this is such a valuable addition to Red Hat:

ManageIQ Strengthens Red Hat's Open Hybrid Cloud Portfolio

Red Hat is focused on delivering open hybrid cloud. An open hybrid cloud enables enterprises to gain the agility, efficiency, and cost benefits of cloud—but bring this to their entire hybrid, heterogenous IT across their choice of physical systems, virtual infrastructure, public cloud environments, existing applications, and new workloads in a consistent and integrated manner. An open hybrid cloud is the way that enterprises can bring the full value of cloud across their entire IT and not just a particular, proprietary silo.

Red Hat has a comprehensive portfolio already for creating open hybrid clouds, including:

• Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization, and our upcoming Red Hat OpenStack product, which offer a compelling combination to build a powerful Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) foundation

• Red Hat CloudForms, which can aggregate and manage disparate cloud providers and technologies such as Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization, VMware vSphere, and Amazon Web Services to create heterogenous, hybrid clouds

• Red Hat Storage, which provides hybrid cloud storage with a global namespace that can span multiple datacenters, private clouds, and public clouds, as well as heterogenous technologies from bare metal to virtualization to public clouds

• Red Hat OpenShift, the leading open enterprise Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS), which is powered by Red Hat Enterprise Linux and JBoss Enterprise Middleware, and also runs across a choice of physical systems, virtualization technology, and public cloud providers

To this portfolio, ManageIQ brings a wealth of operational management capabilities across an open hybrid cloud. ManageIQ has management capabilities necessary for the day-to-day operations of a cloud, such as chargeback, orchestration, workflow, monitoring, compliance management, and analytics.

And, consistent with Red Hat's open hybrid cloud strategy, ManageIQ brings these operational management capabilities across a wide range of provider technologies, including those from Red Hat, VMware, Microsoft, Amazon, and more.

ManageIQ Brings Immediate Value To Existing Environments

ManageIQ delivers easy and compelling time-to-value. Drop its agent-less virtual appliance into an existing virtualized environment, and ManageIQ will automatically discover and begin reporting on everything from performance statistics to utilization trends. It will automatically introspect the contents of virtual machines and provide automated compliance management as well as self-service access across those VMs. And, it makes adding orchestration and workflow across this environment simple, for everything from auto-flexing and scaling across various providers to chargeback with approval policies.

Working across existing virtualized environments is critical in an open hybrid cloud because enterprises need to be able to leverage their large investments in technologies such as VMware when building clouds—not just stand up brand new cloud infrastructure. Notably, a majority of ManageIQ's customers run primarily on existing VMware-based infrastructure managing Windows-based workloads. Red Hat plans to continue to strengthen and build upon this ability to deal with diverse environments and bring them into cloud.

ManageIQ Has Proven Enterprise Success

ManageIQ has proven itself with significant deployments in some of the world's largest organizations across industries as diverse as financial services, government, technology, retail, telecommunications, and manufacturing. Thanks to a rich feature set and robust architecture, ManageIQ is already managing hybrid clouds spanning many thousands of servers and multiple datacenters around the world.

ManageIQ is a Great Technology Fit

ManageIQ complements Red Hat's core IaaS technologies extremely well. With the addition of ManageIQ, Red Hat's foundational IaaS portfolio now spans:

• CloudForms: hybrid cloud IaaS solution that enables the management, brokering, and aggregation of capacity across various virtualization and cloud providers as well as the management of applications across hybrid clouds

• Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization: comprehensive virtualization management solution that is a compelling virtualization substrate for organizations to build cloud environments in terms of performance, security, and value

• ManageIQ: hybrid cloud operations management solution that provides enterprises operational management tools including monitoring, chargeback, governance, and orchestration across virtual and cloud infrastructure from Red Hat, Amazon, Microsoft, and VMware

Additionally, ManageIQ is implemented in the same technology as CloudForms: Ruby on Rails. This greatly simplifies integration of ManageIQ's capabilities with CloudForms. And, it will also ease the process of open sourcing ManageIQ (Yes, Red Hat intends to open source ManageIQ!).

Our Customers Love ManageIQ

ManageIQ has been a certified partner of Red Hat, with its offerings available as a part of Red Hat's Marketplace. Consequently, we have seen first-hand the success our joint customers have achieved working with a ManageIQ and other Red Hat products as a part of implementing open hybrid clouds. Consistently, customers have lauded to Red Hat both ManageIQ's powerful features and ease-of-use as they manage their clouds.