Red Hat to Acquire eNovance, Focus Together on OpenStack

In conjunction with the recent OpenStack Summit in Atlanta, Red Hat had confirmed many new OpenStack-centric initiatives, one of which was that the company is collaborating with eNovance, a leader in the open source cloud computing market, tto drive Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) and telecommunications features into OpenStack. Now, Red Hat has announced that it will acquire eNovance for about  70 million euros, or $95 million, in cash and stock.

eNovance is an important player on the OpenStack scene, and is especially known for its work with telecommunications companies.  eNovance helps service providers and large-scale private enterprises build and deploy cloud infrastructures quickly and cost effectively, and will create new lines of business for Red Hat.

As noted by IDC analysts Laura DuBois and Ashish Nadkarni in their recent recap of the spring 2014 OpenStack Summit, "Integrators such as eNovance will continue to assist cloud service providers and enterprises in building large OpenStack clouds. ... The future for OpenStack is looking very bright."

eNovance is one of the top 10 contributors to the upstream OpenStack project, and is the only European Gold Member company of the OpenStack Foundation. The company has more than 150 global customers, including Alcatel-Lucent, AXA, Cisco, Cloudwatt, and Ericsson. The company has offices in Paris; Montreal; and Bangalore, India.

Red Hat and eNovance first partnered in 2013 to deliver OpenStack implementation and integration services to joint customers, based on the Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform.  At OpenStack Summit in May, the two companies announced an expanded collaboration to drive Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) and telecommunications innovations into OpenStack, aimed at delivering the industry’s most complete, carrier-grade telecommunications offering based on Linux, Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM), and OpenStack.

Raphaël Ferreira, co-founder & chief executive officer, eNovance, said in a statement:

“eNovance, like Red Hat, understands the transformative power OpenStack can have on the enterprise market when it is both deployed and integrated in the right fashion. We are excited to become part of Red Hat, a company that not only offers one of the best-in-class OpenStack distributions on the market today, but also which shares our common belief that OpenStack is best deployed and integrated in a continuous and seamless manner."