IBM is buying Redhat for 34B or over 10 times revenue. My guess is that IBM will sell
off divisions and RA (AKA layoff many veteran IBMers) to fund this crazy buy. That is still ALOT of money!
AND Redhat is open source, not cloud, So it is misleading to call it a cloud buy.
It does distract us from the Watson debacle that is unfolding.
We will watch as IBM destroys another great company. Let the fun begin!
They can only pay by selling off other businesses and generating free cash flow. Systems Group and Services are certainly gone by end of 2019. Legacy software may be gone too. The new core will be Cloud on RHEL with OpenShift (a market laggard) plus a bunch of Watson services that don’t integrate. Maybe a weak competitor to Windows-centric Azure but AWS still leads the pack.
I am sad that the demise of IBM occurs this way. It appears they want to position to be bought by Azure to round out their Linux capabilities. I doubt M$FT is dumb enough to make that acquisition though. AWS won’t want it as they’re moving to Cisco back end.
She paid nearly 4X revenue for Merge and they were\ are in a declining market. It makes no sense whatsoever.
Red Hat open source? Not for long...
Why does IBM think that because they have failed the cloud race, they can simply buy a spot? IBM's reputation and inability to execute will just destroy Red Hat, nothing more.