Red Hat has closed its acquisition of hybrid cloud computing provider ManageIQ as part of an effort to boost its cloud portfolio.

The company said that the $104m deal, which was first announced in December of last year, would allow it to better manage hybrid cloud deployments which mix public and private cloud platforms. Based out of offices in the US, UK and Germany, MangeIQ develops automation products which allow administrators to automate day-to-day activities on private clouds.

Red Hat said that the acquisition will allow it to better orchestrate management and integration across both its on-premise cloud computing and public enterprise cloud computing brands.

The company said that it will be offering the ManageIQ products alongside the Red Hat Enterprise Virtualisation and CloudForms infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) brands.

“We’ve worked with ManageIQ as a partner to our Red Hat Enterprise Virtualisation platform and saw an opportunity to expand our hybrid cloud management capabilities with an even closer relationship with ManageIQ’s compelling portfolio,” said Red hat cloud business unit general manager Bryan Che.

“With the closing of the acquisition, we now begin work to integrate ManageIQ’s enterprise cloud management and automation technologies with our complementary Red Hat CloudForms hybrid IaaS solution and our open Red Hat Enterprise Virtualisation management solution.”

Making cloud platforms more interoperable and compatible has emerged as a top priority for Red Hat in recent months.

In December, Red Hat unveiled a series of updates to Enterprise Virtualisation and CloudForms designed to help both platforms better integrate with hybrid cloud models.