Red Hat Signs Definitive Agreement to Acquire JBoss

RALEIGH, N.C.–(BUSINESS WIRE)–April 10, 2006–Red Hat, Inc. (NASDAQ: RHAT – News), the world’s leading provider of open source solutions to the enterprise, today announced that it has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire JBoss, the global leader in open source middleware. By acquiring JBoss, Red Hat expects to accelerate the shift to service-oriented architectures (SOA), by enabling the next generation of web-enabled applications running on a low-cost, open source platform.
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Red Hat will acquire JBoss for approximately $350 million in initial consideration, plus approximately $70 million subject to the achievement of certain future performance metrics. The transaction consideration is composed of approximately 40% in cash and 60% in Red Hat common stock.
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JBoss now can provide a very rich set of applications, including their J2EE server and portal, development IDE, transaction management…. This will gives Red Hat a middleware stack that rivals, and maybe will beats, what IBM offers (with Websphere), but for tens (or hundreds) of thousands of dollars less.