James Whitehurst, Red Hat’s CEO, continues to offer interesting details about his company’s strategy around cloud computing.
He recently said that clouds can become the mother of all lock-ins and now he’s openly saying that Red Hat is looking for acquisitions in the virtualization and cloud computing space.
What companies may be interesting for Red Hat?
The vendor is working to deliver a commercial implementation of the Deltacloud open source meta-APIs, but it seems that the product won’t be ready before 2011.
Red Hat may want to acquire a company that accelerates such release, also considering that Novell is finalizing its own Cloud Manager. Plus, the company may want to buy a startup that has a strong commitment on KVM, since the whole Red Hat strategy is now beyond Xen.
The first candidate matching the criteria certainly is Enomaly, with its Elastic Computing Platform (ECP), which already addresses cloud providers and has an interesting focus on security.
Less expensive (and less mature) alternatives are the newcomer Abiquo and OpenNebula.