Raleigh-based Red Hat has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire Sistina
Software, a storage
infrastructure software company. As part of Red Hat's "Open Source Architecture" strategy, the acquisition
will provide Enterprise Linux customers a path to virtualization and vendor-independent storage solutions.
Sistina's storage infrastructure software is the foundation for building, integrating and deploying data-sharing
storage solutions across the enterprise. Under the terms of the acquisition, Sistina's engineering team,
consisting of industry experts in clustering and virtualization, will augment Red Hat's development efforts.
The integrated team will work to make all of Sistina's technologies open source and available as a part
of a subscription in the first half of 2004. Officials expect Red Hat's acquisition of Sistina to be
finalized in early January at a purchase price of approximately $31 million to be paid through issuance
of Red Hat common stock.
Red Hat is a CED member.