Red Hat Inc., of Research Triangle Park, N.C., agreed on Monday to acquire Oakland, Calif.-based C2Net Software, the developer of the Apache-based Stronghold Web server.
The transaction was valued at approximately US$44 million in stock.
Tim Buckley, Red Hat’s chief operating officer, said that the purchase of C2Net furthers Red Hat’s strategy to be a single source for Internet infrastructure needs.
The Stronghold Web server contributes security to Red Hat’s product collection; it enables customers to securely conduct transactions over the Internet.
“We hear it from our customers all the time, that the whole issue of security is very large,” Buckley said.
Red Hat’s Internet infrastructure product offerings now include secure Web servers, post-PC devices connected to each other through those servers, and the development tools and services to create, deploy, and manage Internet infrastructures.
This is the fifth acquisition Red Hat has made since going public about a year ago. The company acquired WireSpeed Communications, in Huntsville, Ala., for network and telecommunications software; Bluecurve, in Oakland, Calif., for performance management software; Hell’s Kitchen Systems, in Pittsburgh, for e-commerce payment processing technology; and Cygnus Solutions, in Sunnyvale, Calif., for software, tools, and services.
Research firm Netcraft, in Bath, England, reported that as of May 2000, 36 per cent of all public Web sites run on Linux-based operating systems, making Linux the most popular choice for deploying public Web sites.
