Red Hat Inc. has put hybrid computing at the center of its long-term growth strategy, but while the company’s on-premise software portfolio may be second to none in the open-source world, its public cloud lineup lags behind the competition in both adoption and functionality. The Linux giant hopes to narrow the gap with the acquisition of FeedHenry Ltd., a provider of mobile development services based in Waterford, Ireland.

A spinout of the Telecommunications Software and Systems Group at the Waterford Institute of Technology, the firm offers a managed environment for building and testing cross-platform applications. The environment is built in the Node.js language, which has gained popularity thanks to its compatibility with both the front- and the back-end of the service stack, and provides development tools for each.

To assist coders with creating the user-facing side of their apps, FeedHenry offers support for an impressive lineup of frameworks that cover everything from accessing device-specific capabilities to optimizing HTML5 code. And for handling the computational heavy lifting behind the scenes, the platform provides connectors for Salesforce.com, Oracle and other backoffice systems Rounding out the package is integration with leading application testing and mobile device management solutions.

The purchase of FeedHenry will bring a much-needed mobile focus to Red Hat’s existing development portfolio, which is one of the most comprehensive in the industry thanks to its acquisition of middleware giant JBoss Inc. Red Hat has lagged in in support for smartphones and tablets, though.

The market for mobile development suites is relatively small at $1.4 billion in 2013, but it’s rapidly outpacing the overall enterprise segment with a projected annual growth rate of nearly 40 percent through 2017, according to IDC. That increase mirrors the explosion of connected devices in the corporate network.

That makes app developers critical to Red Hat’s public cloud plans and, by extension, its broader roadmap for hybrid computing. The strategic value of FeedHenry is reflected in the price tag of €63.5 million or about $82 million. Among the investors in the company is VMware Inc., one of Red Hat’s top competitors, which contributed to a round of funding last May but has since mostly abandoned the application development space in an effort to refocus on expanding its core virtualization business beyond servers.

The acquisition, Red Hat’s fourth this year, is set to complete in the third quarter of its fiscal year subject to the usual closing conditions.