Red Hat is sprucing up its portfolio of enterprise services with the acquisition of C2Net, the privately owned developer of Stronghold, a secure server based on the Apache platform.

C2Net brings some punters to the Red Hat party -Amazon.com, Ameritrade, IBM and Morgan Stanley Dean Witter Online are cited as customers in the press statement announcing the deal.

Stronghold, which runs on other operating system platforms as well as Apache, is the most popular commercial SSL Web server on the Internet with more than 30 per cent of the secure web server market, according to an organisation cited on the samesaid statement, called SecuritySpace.com.

Red Hat is paying for California-based C2Net through the issuance of approximately 2 million new shares. The acquisition is expected to close on 31 August. ®