Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE: RHT) has announced that it has agreed to acquire FeedHenry, a top mobile application platform provider, for around $83 million US (63.5 million Euros) in cash. The transaction is expected to close in Q3 Fiscal Year 2015.
Founded in 2010 as a spin out from the Waterford Institute of Technology, FeedHenry offers application developers an open, extensible backend as a service (Baas) based on Node.js for client and server side mobile apps. The platform lets developers create native (Android, iOS, Windows Phone and Blackberry), hybrid, HTML5 or web apps, and supports a 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.
The platform also offers reusable connectors and plug-ins to common enterprise systems such as salesforce.com, SAP and Oracle, and it integrates with mobile application and device management solutions such as AirWatch and MobileIron.
Red Hat plans to include FeedHenry as part of its platform as a service (PaaS) strategy, providing a platform and services for mobile developers and applications. Red Hat’s major competitors in the space now include Google, Microsoft, and Amazon have all begun to offer their own services designed for developers building mobile apps.
FeedHenry was only one of just a few remaining independent BaaS providers. In April 2013, Parse got bought by Facebook, where it continues to thrive. PayPal bought StackMob, another big name in BaaS, in December, but later shut down the service. Kinvey, one of the only two major remaining BaaS providers left, recently announced an arrangement with VMware to offer a hybrid product built on VMware’s vCloud Air.
IDC predicts the mobile application platform market will grow 38.7 percent compound annual growth rate from $1.4 billion in 2013 to $4.8 billion by 2017.
