Enterprise open source software company Red Hat has made a number of acquisitions to boost its business process capabilities and reports strong growth of the business, as large and small companies adopt more cost effective, subscription-based models for information technology (IT) systems, says Red Hat Europe, Middle East and Africa senior VP and GM Werner Knoblich.

The company invested in middleware company JBoss in 2006 and acquired JBoss’s FuseSource in 2012. Red Hat JBoss Fuse is a commercially proven integration and business processing platform that boosts its business processing capabilities and enables it to support new business processing solutions. It also acquired business process management technology developed by Polymita Technologies and will develop it as part of its Red Hat JBoss Middleware suite of products.

Red Hat has made strategic investments in the area of cloud solutions, noting that running infrastructure as Open Stack environments is increasing, as demands for interoperability between vendors and competitors increases. Further, giant IT companies are also making significant investments in open source systems, including IBM, HP, Intel, Huawei and Cisco, besides others, as they recognise a shift in the consumption patterns of IT systems.

The company also acquired open source storage provider Inktank and its distributed object and block storage technology product Ceph. This will enable Red Hat to improve its infrastructure-as-a-service offerings by unify-ing the management of disparate storage and resources, further enabling private clouds to burst out, securely and internally controlled, into public cloud offerings when more resources are required. In July, Red Hat announced the availability of Inktank Ceph Enterprise 1.2, with new features to help customers store and manage an entire spectrum of data – from ‘hot’ mission-critical data to ‘cold’ archival data.

Further, Red Hat acquired open source cloud computing services company eNovance, which will enhance Red Hat’s public–private cloud integration capabilities. The engineering talent in eNovance will also improve Red Hat’s ability to meet growing demand for enterprise Open Stack consulting, design and deployment, says Knoblich.

Red Hat showed 15% growth in its revenue in the year ended February 2014 to $1.53-billion from $1.33-billion in the previous financial year. It increased its profit after expenses over the same period by 18.6% to $178-million from $150.2-million.

Its first-quarter results at the end of May showed continued strong revenue growth of 17% year-on-year.

“Red Hat’s acquisitions are strategic and position it for continued strong growth in difficult economic times. “Many companies and industries are trying to reduce costs and rationalise expenses while simultaneously aiming to gain additional value from existing information technology investments and reduce vendor lock-in and inflexible and long-term licensing models.”

The acquisitions also enable Red Hat to improve its infrastructure-as-a-service capabilities, as combining computing, storage and networking in a single, software-defined environment is required to provide flexibility for future data centres. This software layer means that computing power, compute nodes, storage controllers and data centre resources can be changed on demand in such an environment, especially in private cloud systems.