Maureen O'Gara

Red Hat closed its acquisition of ManageIQ in December shortly after it agreed to buy the joint for $104 million and on Tuesday morning it said in a webcast that it's going to integrate ManageIQ's cloud management and automation widgetry with its CloudForms Infrastructure-as-a-Service platform to expand its all-important open hybrid cloud portfolio.

When this will happen is unclear.

ManageIQ lets users deploy, manage and optimize across private clouds, public clouds and virtualized infrastructures.

Red Hat's Cloud Business Unit general manager Bryan Che said, "We've worked with ManageIQ as a partner to our Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization platform with successful joint customers and saw an opportunity to expand our hybrid cloud management capabilities with an even closer relationship with ManageIQ's compelling portfolio. With the closing of the acquisition, we now begin work to integrate ManageIQ's enterprise cloud management and automation technologies with our complementary Red Hat CloudForms hybrid Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) solution and our open Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization management solution. With this combination, we can offer our customers an unparalleled open hybrid cloud management portfolio."

ManageIQ should tuck in nicely with RHEV and is expected to work with Red Hat's OpenStack distribution when it comes out later this year.

There's supposed to be little overlap in the functionalities of Red Hat's widgetry and ManageIQ's, and both ManageIQ and CloudForms are implemented in Ruby on Rails, which should make it easier for Red Hat to open source the ManageIQ stuff like it's promised.

On his blog Che said, "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."

In fact, ManageIQ provides orchestration, chargeback and governance across virtual and cloud infrastructure from Amazon and Microsoft as well as VMware and Red Hat in a single view.

Besides the fact that their technology and solutions portfolios are complementary, Red Hat and ManageIQ also share many joint customers - and, happily for them, most of ManageIQ's generally large customers are also Red Hat customers and apparently delighted with their merger.

IDC expects spending on cloud systems management software to exceed $3.6 billion by 2016.

IDC research VP Mary Johnston Turner finds that "As more and more production workloads are deployed across heterogeneous virtual, private cloud and public cloud data centers, IT buyers are prioritizing investments in management solutions that can automate and optimize end-to-end performance and capacity utilization across these complex environments."