Enterprise software provider Red Hat, Inc. announced it is acquiring Ansible, Inc., a configuration management and IT automation start-up founded in 2013, and the company behind the popular open-source Ansible project. Red Hat is buying Ansible for a reported $100 million, and will roll Ansible's automation capabilities into its Linux distribution portfolio across public, private, and hybrid clouds.

Ansible is a relatively recent player that's made some noise in the configuration management space behind leaders Chef and Puppet Labs, which also offer open-source IT automation software fitted into enterprise solutions. The growing number of developers using Ansible (who've made more than 16,600 open-source commits on GitHub to date) point to its more intuitive feel in application deployment, management, and orchestration, and a much easier learning curve compared to Chef and Puppet.

"We're thrilled that Red Hat, a global leader in open source, has chosen Ansible to tackle the future of IT automation and systems management," said Ansible co-founder and CEO Saïd Ziouani, in a news release. "This is a strong validation that Ansible's simplicity, enterprise customer base, and robust community is winning in enterprise IT automation, from compute to networking to cloud to containers."

Ziouani worked at Red Hat for a decade before founding Ansible, which raised $6 million in Series A funding in 2013. Ansible already integrates with Red Hat offerings including OpenShift, Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), and Red Hat's distribution of OpenStack, the popular open-source cloud-computing platform. Ansible already boasts a stable of big-name enterprise customers including Atlassian, Cisco, Evernote, Hootsuite, and Twitter.

For Red Hat, this deal adds to the company's track record of smart acquisitions to shore up various aspects of its enterprise software and Linux portfolio. In the past year and a half, the company has acquired FeedHenry for back-end mobile app integration, eNovance for greater OpenStack cloud scaling, and InkTank to augment its storage capabilities with the open-source Ceph platform. Ansible gives Red Hat an agile orchestration technology to put its full weight behind in competing with Chef and Puppet.

Red Hat has already detailed plans to integrate Ansible into new Red Hat CloudForms and Red Hat Satellite offerings, and to continue to support Ansible's enterprise products, Ansible and Ansible Tower. The transaction is expected to close this month.

Joe Fitzgerald, Vice President of Management at Red Hat, spoke to PCMag about what the acquisition means for the company and how Ansible's automation technology in provisioning cloud-based machines can go a long way toward optimizing all the enterprise processes running on top of those machines, from online collaboration to project management.

"When I talk to customers, they say the cost and complexity of management is killing them. We think that modern technology needs to be all about frictionless IT, and that's what this acquisition is all about. With Ansible, we can help customers increase agility, reduce this friction, and embrace DevOps."

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