US software firm Red Hat to buy Israeli cloud, data storage startup NooBaa
Red Hat, recently bought by IBM, says acquisition will help boost its position as a leading provider of open source technologies
Shoshanna Solomon was The Times of Israel's Startups and Business reporter
US software company Red Hat, Inc., which IBM acquired last month for $34 billion, said it has bought Tel Aviv based startup NooBaa, which develops software to manage data storage services across hybrid and multicloud environments. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.
Adding NooBaa’s data management technology increases Red Hat’s existing portfolio of hybrid cloud offerings and will help boost Red Hat’s position “as a leading provider of open hybrid cloud technologies,” the US firm said in a statement announcing the acquisition.
Cloud technology is evolving toward hybrid clouds and multiclouds, according to a report by Gartner, an industry analyst, which forecasts that by 2020, 75% of organizations will have deployed a multicloud or hybrid cloud model. Hybrid cloud is a mix of public cloud, which is generally a cloud service offered over the internet, and private cloud, which is built specifically for one client.
NooBaa was founded in 2013 by Yuval Dimnik, its CEO, and Guy Margalit, Eran Tamir and Nimrod Becker. The startup’s main investors and VC backers are Akamai Technologies Inc., a US cloud service provider, and Israeli venture capital funds OurCrowd and Jerusalem Venture Partners (JVP), according to the company’s website.
NooBaa’s software-driven solution brings agility, flexibility and hybrid capabilities to cloud platforms, its website says. Its technology allows data portability from one cloud to another and also to manage data stored in multiple locations as a single coherent data set. This allows for greater visibility and control over unstructured data spread throughout various cloud environments, the Red Hat statement said.
NooBaa’s technologies “complement and enhance” Red Hat’s portfolio of hybrid cloud technologies, the US firm said.
“Data portability is a key imperative for organizations building and deploying cloud-native applications across private and multiple clouds,” Ranga Rangachari, vice president and general manager of storage and hyperconverged infrastructure at Red Hat said in the statement. “NooBaa’s technologies will augment our portfolio and strengthen our ability to meet the needs of developers in today’s hybrid and multicloud world.”
Last month, IBM agreed to acquire Red Hat for $34 billion, in the largest software deal ever.
