Red Hat today announced the acquisition of privately held eNovance in a deal that brings one of the top OpenStack cloud contributors into the Red Hat fold. The deal is valued at approximately 50 million euros in cash and 20 million euros in shares of Red Hat common stock, which converts to approximately $95 million USD. Red Hat is not providing an official USD conversion amount for the transaction at this time.

eNovance is one of the top 10 contributors to the open-source OpenStack platform, as is Red Hat. What eNovance brings to the table is a services business around OpenStack.

Arun Oberoi, executive vice president of global sales and services at Red Hat, told eWEEK that from a services standpoint, eNovance brings a lot of breadth, scale and expertise in building, integrating and maintaining both private and public cloud environments.

"They will provide a center of excellence capability on continuous integration/continuous delivery methodology in customer OpenStack environments," Oberoi said. "They will help us extend a DevOps capability across a spectrum of dev, test and production clouds."

In addition, eNovance brings to Red Hat a strong Ceph storage capability, Oberoi said. Red Hat acquired Inktank, the lead commercial sponsor behind the open-source Ceph storage filesystem at the end of April in a deal valued at $175 million.

eNovance is also a big contributor to the OpenStack Designate DNS as a Service project, which was recently accepted into OpenStack as an incubated project.

"eNovance's breadth and depth of expertise in and range of contributions to the OpenStack community were a key consideration," Oberoi said.

From an integration perspective, eNovance will fit into the existing Red Hat portfolio for both technology and services.

"From a services perspective, eNovance will become Red Hat's center of excellence for OpenStack cloud services," Oberoi said. "For products and technologies, the teams will work together to evolve to a single product set over time, leveraging the technologies and expertise from both teams."

Red Hat has its own OpenStack platform with existing customer deployments. Oberoi noted that eNovance and Red Hat have several common customers.

"We also have a healthy mix of new customers added to the mix," Oberoi said.

Sean Michael Kerner is a senior editor at eWEEK and InternetNews.com. Follow him on Twitter @TechJournalist.