The title should come as no surprise, as many have predicted such an acquisition in the past. The similar open source ideologies, the technology fit, the executive team's open source background and the rapid adoption of Ansible in the enterprise certainly draw parallels to the world's leader in open source technology.
What was once a prediction is now reality, in just a little more than two years since Ansible, Inc., opened its doors, and we are thrilled!
Ansible made its name in IT automation, and our agile, simple and agentless model allowed us to reach beyond just configuration management and into application deployment and multitier orchestration. This helped to establish a strong lead in DevOps with CI/CD, while latching on to fast growing areas such as cloud, network and container management. Our open source project boomed, becoming one of the most successful projects on GitHub (#1 follower presence in IT automation) with more than 1,200 contributors. Ultimately, this success led to the Ansible project being named as one of 2014's top 10 open source projects, and a place in Gartner's ‘Cool DevOps Vendor’ report in 2015.
Our customer adoption has also rapidly grown since inception, with more than 500 customers today. This includes a dozen Fortune 100 customers, from financial services to retail to healthcare, with deployments ranging from small shops with a few machines to massive enterprises managing thousands of servers in production.
Ansible's success was a result of some solid product design principles, driven by an amazing community and backed by a dedicated corporate team. Although the company is now about 50 people strong, the team has pushed the performance level to that achieved by much larger organizations. By continuously living through our core principles of ‘Kindness, Accountability, and Openness’, we have hired strong contributors and leaders, who all work well together to create one the most respected brands in IT today.
Red Hat, being the most successful open source company today, has been used as the gauge by which new open source companies, those ready to tackle the monetization uphill battle, are measured. Its rich software stack, spanning compute, storage, virtualization and cloud as well as its wide customer base and reseller channels, will help bring Ansible automation to a whole new playing field. Working as part of Red Hat’s management business unit and leveraging tools like CloudForms and Satellite to provide an enterprise scale IT management and automation framework.
Today is a great day for Ansible, a great day for our customers and partners, and a great day for simplified IT management!
