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IBM To Buy Red Hat, the Top Linux Distributor, For $34 Billion (bloomberg.com)
International Business Machines (IBM) is acquiring software maker Red Hat in a deal valued at $34 billion, the companies said Sunday. From a report: The purchase, announced on Sunday afternoon, is the latest competitive step among large business software companies to gain an edge in the fast-growing market for Internet-style cloud computing. In June, Microsoft acquired GitHub, a major code-sharing platform for software developers, for $7.5 billion. IBM said its acquisition of Red Hat was a move to open up software development on computer clouds, in which software developers write applications that run on remote data centers. From a press release: This acquisition brings together the best-in-class hybrid cloud providers and will enable companies to securely move all business applications to the cloud. Companies today are already using multiple clouds. However, research shows that 80 percent of business workloads have yet to move to the cloud, held back by the proprietary nature of today's cloud market. This prevents portability of data and applications across multiple clouds, data security in a multi-cloud environment and consistent cloud management.
IBM and Red Hat will be strongly positioned to address this issue and accelerate hybrid multi-cloud adoption. Together, they will help clients create cloud-native business applications faster, drive greater portability and security of data and applications across multiple public and private clouds, all with consistent cloud management. In doing so, they will draw on their shared leadership in key technologies, such as Linux, containers, Kubernetes, multi-cloud management, and cloud management and automation. IBM's and Red Hat's partnership has spanned 20 years, with IBM serving as an early supporter of Linux, collaborating with Red Hat to help develop and grow enterprise-grade Linux and more recently to bring enterprise Kubernetes and hybrid cloud solutions to customers. These innovations have become core technologies within IBM's $19 billion hybrid cloud business. Between them, IBM and Red Hat have contributed more to the open source community than any other organization.
IBM and Red Hat will be strongly positioned to address this issue and accelerate hybrid multi-cloud adoption. Together, they will help clients create cloud-native business applications faster, drive greater portability and security of data and applications across multiple public and private clouds, all with consistent cloud management. In doing so, they will draw on their shared leadership in key technologies, such as Linux, containers, Kubernetes, multi-cloud management, and cloud management and automation. IBM's and Red Hat's partnership has spanned 20 years, with IBM serving as an early supporter of Linux, collaborating with Red Hat to help develop and grow enterprise-grade Linux and more recently to bring enterprise Kubernetes and hybrid cloud solutions to customers. These innovations have become core technologies within IBM's $19 billion hybrid cloud business. Between them, IBM and Red Hat have contributed more to the open source community than any other organization.
IBM said its acquisition of Red Hat was a move to open up software development on computer clouds, in which software developers write applications that run on remote data centers.
It's all open source. What's stopping them from developing to the Cloud, NOW?
Shai Schticks:"You don't make peace with friends, you make peace with enemies"
My feelings exactly. As a former employee for both places, I see this as the death knell for Red Hat. Not immediately, not quickly, but eventually Red Hat's going to go the same way as every other company IBM has acquired.
Red Hat's doom (again, all IMO) started about 10 years ago or so when Matt Szulik left and Jim Whitehurst came on board. Nothing against Jim, but he NEVER seemed to grasp what F/OSS was about. Hell, when he came onboard he wouldn't (and never did) use Linux at all: instead he used a Mac, and so did the rest of the EMT (executive management team) over time. What company is run by people who refuse to use its own product except for one that doesn't have faith. The person on top of the BRAND AND PEOPLE team "needed" an iPad, she said, to do her work (quoting a friend in the IT dept who was asked to get it and set it up for her).
Then when they (the EMTs) wanted to move away from using F/OSS internally to outsourcing huge aspects of our infrastructure (like no longer using F/OSS for email and instead contracting with GOOGLE to do our email, calendaring and document sharing) is when, again for me, the plane started to spiral. How can we sell to OUR CUSTOMERS the idea that "Red Hat and F/OSS will suit all of your corporate needs" when, again, the people running the ship didn't think it would work for OURS? We had no special email or calendar needs, and if we did WE WERE THE LEADERS OF OPEN SOURCE, couldn't we make it do what we want? Hell, I was on an internal (but on our own time) team whose goal was to take needs like this and incubate them with an open source solution to meet that need.
But the EMTs just didn't want to do that. They were too interested in what was "the big thing" (at the time Open Shift was where all of our hiring and resources were being poured) to pay attention to the foundations that were crumbling.
And now, here we are. Red Hat is being subsumed by the largest closed-source company on the planet, one who does their job sub-optimally (to be nice). This is the end of Red Hat as we know it. Without 5-7 years Red Hat will go the way of Tivoli and Lotus: it will be a brand name that lacks any of what made the original company what it was when it was acquired.