Red Hat to Buy Gluster for $136 Million Expanding in Cloud Computing
October 4, 2011
Grazed from Bloomberg. Author: Niamh Ring.
Red Hat Inc. (RHT), a provider of open source software and services, agreed to acquire closely held Gluster Inc. for about $136 million in cash to expand in Internet-based computing.
Red Hat’s third-quarter and full-year fiscal 2012 earnings forecast aren’t changed by the deal, the Raleigh, North Carolina-based company said in a statement today. Integrating Gluster may make Red Hat’s fiscal 2013 operating margin excluding some items 150 basis points lower than fiscal 2012…
Gluster gives Red Hat an opportunity to expand a $4 billion market for storage of so-called unstructured data such as e- mails and social media postings. The deal also helps Red Hat, the largest seller of Linux software, offer more solutions to customers who want to access data over the Internet using cloud computing.
“This is an exciting new area of potential growth for Red Hat and one in which we intend to invest aggressively,” said Charlie Peters, Red Hat’s chief financial officer, in the statement.
Red Hat fell $1.87, or 4.6 percent, to $38.59 at 9:40 a.m. on the New York Stock Exchange. The stock had dropped 11 percent this year before today.
The acquisition is expected to close this month, the companies said in the statement.