Red Hat has signed a definitive agreement to buy out ManageIQ, a software firm that specializes in making solutions for managing virtualized environments.

The open-source giant agreed to pay $104.0 million in cash for the Mahwah, New Jersey-based company, which has held the status of Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization Certified Partner for nearly a year now.  It’s also a member of the Open Virtualization Alliance, an industry-associated initiative that Red Hat co-founded together with IBM.

ManageIQ’s hybrid cloud automation technology – which covers monitoring, chargeback, governance, and orchestration – will be bundled with CloudForms, Red Hat’s open, cross-vendor IaaS. The software will also continue to ship with the latest release Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization, which MangelQ has supported since December 5.

“Industry and customer response to Red Hat’s vision for the open hybrid cloud has been overwhelmingly positive because it offers the best of both worlds: the ability to tap into the public cloud when and where it makes sense, while leveraging existing investments for cloud infrastructure,” said Red Hat’s president of products  Paul Cormier. For enterprise cloud initiatives, effective cloud management is critical. ManageIQ offers robust features, including orchestration, policy, workflow, monitoring and chargeback, that deepen Red Hat’s cloud management capabilities and bring the promise of open hybrid cloud a step closer for the industry.”

Red Hat is the latest example of a big cloud vendor buying one of its top partners to boost control over its ecosystem. Late last month we learned that EMC bought out database monitoring startup More IT for an undisclosed amount. The developer’s MoreVRP visibility solution was certified to run on EMC hardware 12 months prior to the deal, and was succesfully deployed by several major clients in the interval.