The huge $34 billion IBM Red Hat acquisition has officially been completed this month. Following the deal, what does this mean for the technology market?
In my time I’ve had the privilege of working with customers who rely on each of IBM as well as Red Hat technologies. Here’s my perspective on the five major effects this acquisition could impact the market.
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Open source consolidation
One of the major benefits business coaching services of this purchase will see the consolidation and consolidation in the market for open source. The good thing about this is that IBM will use its huge sales engine to encourage the acceptance of open-source technologies as well as standards. This will further establishing Kubernetes and the other initiatives as the standard basis for cloud computing.
The most troubling aspect of this consolidation is the reduction in competition it causes. A healthy competition can lead to innovation and, ultimately, benefits for customers. If there is no competition between IBM or Red Hat competing for cloud market share other players will have to come in to help build the momentum.
On the other hand there is a long history of successful market consolidation through companies like Microsoft or GitHub. They have made a huge change in their culture and made numerous positive contribution to open source community. One positive sign of the combination could be Red Hat and IBM’s position within the community of open source. Red Hat is the obvious frontrunner however IBM has a long history of investing on open-source projects across areas such as Apache, Linux, Eclipse, Hyperledger, and Istio. With this deal, IBM will become one of the biggest open source contributors around the globe.
Jim Whitehurst, the president and CEO at Red Hat, said of the deal:
“Joining forces with IBM gives Red Hat the opportunity to bring more open source innovation to an even broader range of organizations and will enable us to scale to meet the need for hybrid cloud solutions that deliver true choice and agility.”
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One of the biggest concerns in executive coaching services the world of open source is the fact that Red Hat will no longer be able to participate in open source projects, regardless of the commercial benefits for Red Hat. But, IBM currently has no limitations on their contributions to rival projects. In fact this acquisition demonstrates that they’re doubling down in their open-source wager.
- Kubernetes ubiquity
Another significant impact on the market for cloud is the growing importance of Kubernetes’ role as the primary facilitator of hybrid cloud in enterprises. There’s been an explosion of containers using the docker image format as well as Kubernetes. And even while they’re not yet mature technologies, they’ve now become an established standard to manage and run applications. Kubernetes is now becoming a popular base for private, public and multi-cloud platforms.
