So the acquisition rumors some months ago were half true. Atlanta based JBoss is being acquired by Raleigh based RedHat for $350M with a $70M earnout. It makes a ton of sense for RedHat to own JBoss in my opinion. They’re both based in the South and both are fundamentally open-source initiatives, but more importantly they target a very similar enterprise customer.

In my opinion, it makes more sense for a vendor like JBoss, that primarily is known for their application server, to be owned by an OS infrastrastructure vendor like RedHat than by Oracle.  RedHat’s stock price today indicates that the analysts are bullish on the acquisition news as well.  The investors should be happy with the exit terms, considering they only invested $20M.

This entry was posted on Monday, April 10th, 2006 at 9:48 am and is filed under Business, Open Source, Venture Capital. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.