Red Hat Buying Cloud Development Tools Vendor Codenvy

Red Hat is acquiring cloud development tools vendor, Codenvy, in a move that aims to bolster Red Hat's open source platforms for developers who are building container-based and cloud applications for a wide variety of business uses.

The Codenvy deal, which was announced May 25, will in the future allow Codenvy to become a more integral part of Red Hat's recently announced OpenShift.io hosted development environment, according to a statement from Red Hat. Codenvy is already embedded in OpenShift through a previous arrangement. 

A price tag for the transaction and its closing date were not revealed.

Codenvy, which uses the Eclipse Che open source cloud integrated development environment (IDE), combines runtimes, projects and the IDE which allows multiple developers to collaborate in the same development workspaces, according to the companies. Codenvy was founded in 2013 and runs in lightweight Linux containers, offering scalability for building and running millions of workspaces at once time. The containerized workspaces can be accessed through a web browser without requiring the creation and management of development environments. Codenvy features portable universal workspaces and cloud IDE simplify the configuration and sharing challenges created by localhost developer workspaces, allowing developers to contribute to a project without having to install software on their machines.

The idea, according to Red Hat, is that the availability of Codenvy will enable development teams to build complex applications faster with fewer inconsistencies across environments.

Under the deal, Codenvy will join Red Hat's other developer tools and application platforms, including Red Hat JBoss Middleware.

In a separate post on May 25, Codenvy CEO and founder Tyler Jewell wrote that the sale to Red Hat will allow his company to extend its reach to millions of additional open source developers.

"Cloud workspaces let anyone, anywhere contribute to software development projects," wrote Jewell. "It's a simple concept that drove growth in codenvy.io (approximately 45K actives / month) and open source Eclipse Che (1.2M usage hours / month, 4K GitHub stars, and 100 contributors)."

In addition, the acquisition of Codenvy "aligns with Red Hat's focus on improving security features, reliability and performance in its container offerings," said Jewell. "Joining Red Hat opens up opportunities to expand our reach among developers, giving them modern tools to build containerized apps from within their web browser."

Dan Olds, principal analyst with Gabriel Consulting Group, told ITPro that the acquisition of Codenvy gives Red Hat "more cloud chops, and that's certainly going to help them in their quest to play a key role in more cloud deployments."

In addition, Codenvy's depth in cloud development tools "is certainly something that Red Hat can use with both existing and new customers," he added. "This also gives Red Hat a cross-platform tool, which will help them reach many more customers and potential customers.

Another analyst, Rob Enderle, principal of Enderle Group, agreed.

"It is very important for any platform seller to invest heavily in developer tools to assure the relevance of the platform they are selling and supporting," he said. "As we shift to the cloud, having developer tools specifically targeting this opportunity helps the company argue that their offering remains relevant and helps create a better foundation of developers that will use it."

Red Hat has also been busy lately with its product lines and services. Earlier in May, at its annual Red Hat Summit, the company laid out a vision of its future, including more attention to the rapid adoption of containers. To do this, Red Hat said it is continuing and expanding its efforts to spread the use of its Ansible agentless automation platform across its products, including Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Red Hat OpenStack Platform, Red Hat OpenShift, Red Hat Storage and its management offerings.

Five other new projects were also unveiled at Red Hat's Summit, including the company's deepening relationship with Amazon Web Services (AWS), which is going to bring the ability to access AWS services directly from the console in Red Hat OpenShift, even when the platform is running locally instead of on AWS.