Redhat and IBM

[Robvd46]

Guess everyone has seen the news by now...

What are you thoughts on IBM buying Redhat?

Personally, I am super dissapointed and worried about what my certifications will be worth in a year's time.. I would have started my journey to RHCA in a few months but now I am not so sure it's worth it.. Sad day for open source :( 

[felipe_carrasco]

I'm also a little bit worried about this, just last week I paid to sit for my EX300 on November...

[Pete_VM]

I would not worry about it. Red Hat will be around for a while, and their install base is large enough to survive this. MAYBE in a year or two your certification might say "IBM Enterprise Linux", but no one will really know until something happens. I still plan on taking the EX300 in the Spring as normal.

[macplox]

IBM will have to restructure its corporate culture around Red Hat's, otherwise it'll get smothered. I can imagine RH's talent leaving the company once IBM starts imposing internal requirements on its products, as it did in previous acquisitions.

[oldbenko]

What you say is actually why I think nobody should be worried.

If I were to invest a large amount of money, I'd want to make double sure the investment was a safe one and I'd want to do everything in my power to help it work.

[macplox]

IBM's investment in RH is arguably safe for many reasons. IBM's track record regarding acquisitions is what brought the gloom and anxiety about for the investors.

[oldbenko]

Have you looked at Red Hat's track record in that respect?

There are tiny differences between your usual acquisition and this one.

[PatrykP]

I have not witnessed IBM's previous acquisitions, so I don't have any negative or positive opinion - however the fact tha IBM maintains Power mainframes that play major role in financial institutions, means for me that they are serious about quality of the software and hardware.

But my short opinion is that, I feel like, IBM was bit aside in current quickly developed IT trends - in terms of cloud, x86 servers (both hardware and software) and so on, so possible they major revenue was from really big companies that could affort mainframes. Now, they bought leader in x86 servers operating systems, that has developed some technologies around containers (Openshift), around private cloud (Openstack), automation/orchestration (Ansible/AWX) and so on. At the same time, they introduced their own cloud platform - I don't know what advantages it has over it's competitors. Nonetheless, they now own a very big part of IT marke, and if they manage to integrate and develop the solutions acquired, they will be the major player in the game providing entire solution - form hardware, OS, to container orchestration, to private clouds and public cloud, while the competitors excel only in one field.

It will be interesting to observe next days/years.

[Avnish]

Yes absolutely, it's a bit hard to accept, but if we look at the cloud market especially with AWS or Azure, I think its a wise move to collaborate with IBM. The only concern is how much and will IBM let redhat to work independently, collaborating with technologies and open source.

[micka_luboya]

At this stage is a bit unclear how will this turn out but i feel like it's more of a good deal than a bad one. Redhat couldn't take the Big guns such as (AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google or IBM) so they would have grown but not fast enough. By joining IBM they will benefits from the cash flow injection and Harward expertise of IBM (IBM is still the best server hardware provider in the world)... Power machines, IBM lenovo systems. The way i see this, the only way this works is if IBM lets Redhat run independently which only Redhat knows how to do best...if they want return on 34billions they will have to let Redhat run it's show. 2nd, they should not mess around with pricing model and embrace the opensource way of doing things.