Red Hat today announced that it has signed a definitive agreement to acquire FeedHenry, a leading enterprise mobile application platform provider. FeedHenry expands Red Hat’s broad portfolio of application development, integration, and Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) solutions, enabling Red Hat to support mobile application development in public and private environments.
Enterprises continue to embrace mobile devices as the preferred way to engage and interact with customers, employees, and partners, and new enterprise application software development is increasingly focused on supporting mobile apps and devices. Industry analyst firm IDC expects 1.2 billion smart phones to ship in 2014, representing 19.3 percent growth over 2013. With this significant shift, mobile application platforms have become a critical requirement for efficient development and deployment of backend services for enterprise mobile applications. Cloud-based mobile application platforms such as FeedHenry enable enterprises to support enterprise mobile applications at scale – with centralized security, notification and integration services. IDC predicts the mobile application platform market will grow 38.7 percent compound annual growth rate (CAGR) from $1.4 billion in 2013 to $4.8 billion by 2017.
Aligned with Red Hat’s open hybrid cloud strategy, FeedHenry enables enterprises to accelerate their mobile app development and backend integration via private clouds, public clouds, and on-premises. FeedHenry is an important addition to Red Hat’s JBoss xPaaS for OpenShift strategy, announced in September 2013, providing a platform and services for mobile developers and applications. With its xPaaS services for OpenShift, Red Hat is delivering a rich set of enterprise application, integration and business process automation capabilities and services in an extensible open PaaS platform, and is well-positioned to enable accelerated development and deployment of next-generation enterprise applications and business processes in the cloud. Mobile application services are a key part of that vision and FeedHenry provides the security, policy management, synchronization, and integration features to support mobile applications.
FeedHenry has an open and extensible architecture based on Node.js for client and server side mobile app development. The FeedHenry platform offers developers the flexibility to create native (Android, iOS, Windows Phone and Blackberry), hybrid, HTML5 or web apps. The platform supports a wide variety of popular toolkits including native SDKs, hybrid Apache Cordova, HTML5 and Titanium, as well as frameworks such as Xamarin, Sencha Touch, and other JavaScript frameworks. FeedHenry simplifies backend integration to business systems, speeding app delivery with reusable connectors and plug-ins to common enterprise systems such as salesforce.com, SAP, Oracle and more. FeedHenry also integrates with leading mobile application and device management solutions such as AirWatch and MobileIron. The FeedHenry platform was built to meet today’s business demands while satisfying IT’s requirements for security, control, and scalability.
Founded in 2010 as a spin out from the Telecommunications Software and Systems Group at the Waterford Institute of Technology, FeedHenry is a leader in mobile enterprise application platform technologies. By helping organizations accelerate development and collaboration on mobility projects, FeedHenry gives organizations greater agility, visibility, and efficiency. FeedHenry has a broad footprint, serving a customer base that includes Aer Lingus, Baystate Health, and O2 UK and Ireland, and partners such as Brillio, Court Square, Mubaloo, Rackspace, Telefonica, and UST. The company has offices in Waterford and Dublin, Ireland; Staines, England; and Burlington, Mass.
Red Hat has agreed to acquire FeedHenry, a privately held company, for approximately 63.5 million Euros in cash, subject to certain adjustments at closing. The transaction is expected to close in Q3 Fiscal Year 2015, subject to customary closing conditions.