Newsletter Archives

  • IBM will buy Red Hat – and look at the price!

    I’ll confess I didn’t see this one coming.

    Good analysis from Sean Gallagher at Ars Technica:

    For IBM, the acquisition is about growing IBM’s business in the cloud—private, public, and hybrid—based on the position of the company as the open source and open standards player versus the “proprietary” models of Microsoft, Amazon, and other major cloud players. For Red Hat, the deal is about scaling up the company’s reach. “We can scale at greater speed,” said Cormier, “not just from a Kubernetes perspective, but even with the RHEL base. We can only reach a certain number of customers right now.”

    The offer, $34 billion, is $190 per share, which is 63% more than Red Hat shares were trading for on Friday. IBM’s shares are way down.