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I'm really worried about Redhat. IBM is currently a sinking ship, they've laid off parts of their workforce, they're failing to capture the cloud market, and th

I'm really worried about Redhat. IBM is currently a sinking ship, they've laid off parts of their workforce, they're failing to capture the cloud market, and the Redhat buy seems to be a ploy to maintain relevance. I'm seriously anxious about Redhat being drug under during IBM's death throes. Redhat isn't going to save IBM. They sold because they had an unsustainable business, and Openshift is still a risky play to run a stable business on. The container space is starting to get awfully crowded, and cloud providers can provide better tailored experiences and skip containers altogether with serverless. As a long time taker of Redhat certs, I hope they pull through and still look something like the Redhat I have loved and known.

samstave 8y ago
Seems like Redhat is to IBM as a new puppy is to a failing relationship... However, I am not optimistic that a Glorious Future will be the outcome from the RedHat acquisition; While at Mirantis, I was assisting in RedHat's implementation of OpenStack with Intel/IBM and it was a nightmare. OpenStack, at that time was very difficult to implement with smooth success (much like a JBOSS / WebObjects / Tomcat nightmare implementations back in the early days) -- and the BigCo process-procedure-competency-silos that goes along with it... I can only expect that adding more layers of abstraction and ambiguity of ownership will make for headaches. Here is to hoping that my pessimistic outlook is proven wrong.
- lima 8y ago
  OpenStack is still a nightmare, no matter what distribution. OpenShift, on the other hand, is a breath of fresh air (k8s in general is - the quality is so much higher). Things just work and the docs don't conveniently leave out all the important details.
  - Bombthecat 8y ago
    Try to install kubernetes by hand.. It reminds me of the old days of "dependency hell"
    - lima 8y ago
      Now try it using OpenShift's installer. It's awesome :)
    - rad_gruchalski 8y ago
      Yes, took about a week to figure that one out. Most of the tutorials are always out of date.
    - shaklee3 8y ago
      Not really. Unless you haven't tried it recently, there are many great options. Kubeadm is painless for simple clusters, and kubespray is easy if you know ansible. Of course, both assume some level of sysadmin experience, since it's a tool to manage large clusters.
- nu-world-odor 8y ago
  > Seems like Redhat is to IBM as a new puppy is to a failing relationship... holy hell, well religion isn't going to help I guess.
- samstave 8y ago
  You-know-what, I owe myself and everyone involved with that project a little more info: I was the lead PM responsible for managing the implementation of the OpenStack on RedHat+IBM with Intel TXT being the premise of the implementation such that RH could go back and replicate into their own thing... It was a nightmare project, but on no part, individually of RH, Intel or IBM or Mirantis... Openstack just was NOT READY for production secure workloads. The project was just a bunch of people trying to do their best with shitty tools... But, openstack/shift/the-current-marketplace wouldnt be without the sacrifice of crap on the battlefield. So, at the end of the day, just hope that all your failures are something that others can trample to make-the-world-a-better-place...
  - PopsiclePete 8y ago
    OpenStack screams “enterprise” and “architects” at the top of its lungs and I for one want nothing to do with that crap. I know exactly what it is just by looking at it - a hobbled together patchwork soup of poorly documented and half-abandoned open source middleware that is meant to pay consultants’ salaries and nothing more. Definitely not meant to solve real problems, that’s for damn sure. Who is fooled by this anymore, really? Non-technical middle managers who read a bunch of marketing materials? You can pry k8s from my cold dead hands.
pslam 8y ago
Businesses this big and old don't "sink" unless there is utter contempt for obvious changes in market conditions by the entire board, for a sustained amount of time. Even with utter contempt, it would take an enormous amount of time for them to implode. IBM isn't that stupid and they obviously understand something isn't working. They're also roughly 100 years old (depending on definitions). They're reinvented and reshaped their business many times. "Two new broom handles, two new brushes" but it's still the same company, as they say. I'm afraid I find it ludicrous that IBM would actually end up in anything resembling financial failure.
- neuromantik8086 8y ago
  > They're also roughly 100 years old (depending on definitions). They're reinvented and reshaped their business many times. "Two new broom handles, two new brushes" but it's still the same company, as they say. I'm afraid I find it ludicrous that IBM would actually end up in anything resembling financial failure. People were saying the same thing of Sears 10 years ago...
  - pslam 8y ago
    Sears falls into the "utter contempt" category, along with utter incompetence. It was obvious to every outside observer their model was busted. It was obvious how bad their stores were to anyone who went there to try to buy something. There was nothing sudden about it, really. I think many could see this happening more than 10 years ago. Also, unlike IBM, Sears has very little of worth which would uniquely identify it as "Sears" after asset sale. It's all fungible land, rent, concrete store walls, and staff. They have many competitors with practically identical overlap in business. IBM is not like at all like this.
    - marcosdumay 8y ago
      > It was obvious to every outside observer their model was busted. Well, imagine I am somebody at the target market of IBM (whatever that is), why would I want to hire them?
stevenacreman 8y ago
I've been keeping track of the various Kubernetes services and agree the market is massively crowded right now. AWS, Google and Azure dominate the cloud market. IBM is a distant joint last place by most metrics. OpenShift won't compete with the cloud offerings in the long run. Redhat are currently competing with On-Prem offerings and trying to make a case for 'hybrid'. Even in this market OpenShift is competing against at least 15 alternatives. For anyone interested I've been crowd sourcing data for each and trying to work out key differentiators. https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1nAgDxQZYeAMLwz8iI3_aZ6lagDtEPg8X9PFqQvgtEjA/edit?ts=5bd7135b#gid=0 https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1nAgDxQZYeAMLwz8iI3_a... OpenShift is definitely differentiated in terms of security. They also have network and storage features that are arguably valuable to enterprise customers. Google GKE On-Prem is out soon. I never see Azure Stack mentioned so maybe Microsoft will look into a Docker acquisition to boost their enterprise footprint. The cloud seems like the bigger growth area though so perhaps this On-Prem container platform land grab will be short lived.
- cwyers 8y ago
  Microsoft is clearly investing in Docker, they bought Deis already. http://venturebeat.com/2017/04/10/microosoft-acquires-kubernetes-experts-deis-from-engine-yard/ http://venturebeat.com/2017/04/10/microosoft-acquires-kubern...
- WorldMaker 8y ago
  > I never see Azure Stack mentioned so maybe Microsoft will look into a Docker acquisition to boost their enterprise footprint. The companies using Azure Stack today are some of the least likely to be parroting that fact. Microsoft's on-prem is pretty well entrenched, particularly in "boring enterprise" where pragmatism beats idealism, are quiet "do the work, don't leak the work" more than proudly proclaim to be chasing the trends. That said, Azure Stack (and Azure) already have strong Docker support, without an acquisition to date. More interestingly, in my opinion, though, is that right now Azure Functions is the only "serverless" runtime with a strong open source story, and equally strong on-prem (both as part of Azure Stack and, increasingly from what I hear, standalone) as well as Cloud support.
crunchlibrarian 8y ago
Last quarter IBM had free cash flow of 2.2B. They spent 2.1B of that on stock buybacks and dividends You can't really hide your lack of R&D or missing long term vision with numbers like that.
- yangikan 8y ago
  Free cash flow is after R&D expenses.
mawburn 8y ago
IBM patents everything. I feel like if they were to ever actually go through their death throes, they will start becoming patent trolls.
- jacquesm 8y ago
  Or get bought by patent trolls. They're big enough that that future is hopefully a long time off. It is the last stage of any large company anyway: IP vulture.
nobody271 8y ago
Would you mind entertaining a naive question? What makes redhat worth it? What would make a company choose redhat over Ubuntu (or any flavor of Debian) in 2018?
- lima 8y ago
  RHEL's quality assurance and documentation is top-notch. Ubuntu has been improving, but it's not anywhere as good (which makes sense - Red Hat has much more people working on it). Support is expensive, but worth it. It's not unheard of to get custom kernel patches mere days after you reported an issue. Well, that and the ecosystem of enterprise software which refuse to run on anything but RHEL. And Ubuntu's failure to establish their home-grown stuff: Upstart, Unity, Mir, Ubuntu One, Ubuntu Phone, Juju... That being said, 18.04 is a lot better than 12.04 or 14.04. I'm a Red Hat fan, but I hope Canonical succeeds - the more independent companies there are, the better.
  - secfirstmd 8y ago
    Unless it gets bought by MS
- ilovecaching 8y ago
  I've never seen Ubuntu used in a large enterprise. Redhat dominates the server market. They offer better certification, support, and a package repository geared towards stability and backporting. The seperate Fedora (new a shiny) from RHEL (old and stable). Ubuntu doesn't really have that distinction. Shuttleworth is also kind of a character, and it's hard to rely on him keeping Ubuntu fixed on a particular use case. It's been desktop, then mobile/desktop convergence, and now containers and Kuberentes. Think startup vs big business.
  - jacques_chester 8y ago
    Ubuntu is the default base image for Cloud Foundry, so in fact it's pretty widely embedded in enterprise at this point. But it's an implementation detail, rather than a separate line item on the invoice.
toredash 8y ago
As a so-called "long cert taker", I would expect you to be able to write the name right: Red Hat
mathattack 8y ago
RedHat seems to have already adopted IBM’s approach of “milk the customer base.” They belong together, as neither is a big growth play any more.
ChuckMcM 8y ago
IBM isn't sinking. It is quite large, nearly 400,000 employees. If they laid off 10% of their workforce it would be like a bit more than 1 and a half Facebooks ceased to exist but it would be a drop in the bucket at IBM. What they are is slow moving and hidebound. I think that at some level they understand that, and at other levels they don't. They have an amazing asset in their labs where they can put 1,000 of some of the smartest people you might ever hope to meet on to a problem pretty much instantly. In my short time with them post acquisition I found a company that was very slowly losing its calcified husk and becoming more agile. It had some blind spots but when you replace enough people that can be fixed. As Gerstner showed in the 90's, as Satella is showing at Microsoft, what Welch showed at GE. Put the right leadership team in place and you can do amazing things with that power.
- B1FF_PSUVM 8y ago
  > Welch showed at GE I thought his contribution was "rank and yank" and financial services, both dubious to say the least. Have I been misled?
  - pinewurst 8y ago
    No, you weren't misled. Welch was/is a prime example of the primacy of personal selfishness applied to corporate management.
- user5994461 8y ago
  It's all contractors being sub contracted to other companies. If they laid off 10% of their workers overnight it wouldn't matter because it's the normal cycle of contracting. There can be no growth because contractors don't scale. They bring a fix percentage of their day rate. There could be some products with great people lost in a corner of IBM. However, they will remain a negligible fraction of the company and they won't have the power to turn it around. If AWS/Microsoft makes a new product or service, they can roll out instantly everywhere and capture clients. If IBM does something new, they couldn't begin to sell it, they'd sell you a contractor.
  - 8y ago
robbiemitchell 8y ago
How would you feel about Redhat if it stayed independent? It sounds like they were in trouble.

samstave 8y ago

Seems like Redhat is to IBM as a new puppy is to a failing relationship... However, I am not optimistic that a Glorious Future will be the outcome from the RedHat acquisition; While at Mirantis, I was assisting in RedHat's implementation of OpenStack with Intel/IBM and it was a nightmare. OpenStack, at that time was very difficult to implement with smooth success (much like a JBOSS / WebObjects / Tomcat nightmare implementations back in the early days) -- and the BigCo process-procedure-competency-silos that goes along with it... I can only expect that adding more layers of abstraction and ambiguity of ownership will make for headaches. Here is to hoping that my pessimistic outlook is proven wrong.

lima 8y ago
OpenStack is still a nightmare, no matter what distribution. OpenShift, on the other hand, is a breath of fresh air (k8s in general is - the quality is so much higher). Things just work and the docs don't conveniently leave out all the important details.
- Bombthecat 8y ago
  Try to install kubernetes by hand.. It reminds me of the old days of "dependency hell"
  - lima 8y ago
    Now try it using OpenShift's installer. It's awesome :)
  - rad_gruchalski 8y ago
    Yes, took about a week to figure that one out. Most of the tutorials are always out of date.
  - shaklee3 8y ago
    Not really. Unless you haven't tried it recently, there are many great options. Kubeadm is painless for simple clusters, and kubespray is easy if you know ansible. Of course, both assume some level of sysadmin experience, since it's a tool to manage large clusters.
nu-world-odor 8y ago
> Seems like Redhat is to IBM as a new puppy is to a failing relationship... holy hell, well religion isn't going to help I guess.
samstave 8y ago
You-know-what, I owe myself and everyone involved with that project a little more info: I was the lead PM responsible for managing the implementation of the OpenStack on RedHat+IBM with Intel TXT being the premise of the implementation such that RH could go back and replicate into their own thing... It was a nightmare project, but on no part, individually of RH, Intel or IBM or Mirantis... Openstack just was NOT READY for production secure workloads. The project was just a bunch of people trying to do their best with shitty tools... But, openstack/shift/the-current-marketplace wouldnt be without the sacrifice of crap on the battlefield. So, at the end of the day, just hope that all your failures are something that others can trample to make-the-world-a-better-place...
- PopsiclePete 8y ago
  OpenStack screams “enterprise” and “architects” at the top of its lungs and I for one want nothing to do with that crap. I know exactly what it is just by looking at it - a hobbled together patchwork soup of poorly documented and half-abandoned open source middleware that is meant to pay consultants’ salaries and nothing more. Definitely not meant to solve real problems, that’s for damn sure. Who is fooled by this anymore, really? Non-technical middle managers who read a bunch of marketing materials? You can pry k8s from my cold dead hands.

pslam 8y ago

Businesses this big and old don't "sink" unless there is utter contempt for obvious changes in market conditions by the entire board, for a sustained amount of time. Even with utter contempt, it would take an enormous amount of time for them to implode. IBM isn't that stupid and they obviously understand something isn't working. They're also roughly 100 years old (depending on definitions). They're reinvented and reshaped their business many times. "Two new broom handles, two new brushes" but it's still the same company, as they say. I'm afraid I find it ludicrous that IBM would actually end up in anything resembling financial failure.

neuromantik8086 8y ago
> They're also roughly 100 years old (depending on definitions). They're reinvented and reshaped their business many times. "Two new broom handles, two new brushes" but it's still the same company, as they say. I'm afraid I find it ludicrous that IBM would actually end up in anything resembling financial failure. People were saying the same thing of Sears 10 years ago...
- pslam 8y ago
  Sears falls into the "utter contempt" category, along with utter incompetence. It was obvious to every outside observer their model was busted. It was obvious how bad their stores were to anyone who went there to try to buy something. There was nothing sudden about it, really. I think many could see this happening more than 10 years ago. Also, unlike IBM, Sears has very little of worth which would uniquely identify it as "Sears" after asset sale. It's all fungible land, rent, concrete store walls, and staff. They have many competitors with practically identical overlap in business. IBM is not like at all like this.
  - marcosdumay 8y ago
    > It was obvious to every outside observer their model was busted. Well, imagine I am somebody at the target market of IBM (whatever that is), why would I want to hire them?

stevenacreman 8y ago

I've been keeping track of the various Kubernetes services and agree the market is massively crowded right now. AWS, Google and Azure dominate the cloud market. IBM is a distant joint last place by most metrics. OpenShift won't compete with the cloud offerings in the long run. Redhat are currently competing with On-Prem offerings and trying to make a case for 'hybrid'. Even in this market OpenShift is competing against at least 15 alternatives. For anyone interested I've been crowd sourcing data for each and trying to work out key differentiators. https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1nAgDxQZYeAMLwz8iI3_aZ6lagDtEPg8X9PFqQvgtEjA/edit?ts=5bd7135b#gid=0 https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1nAgDxQZYeAMLwz8iI3_a... OpenShift is definitely differentiated in terms of security. They also have network and storage features that are arguably valuable to enterprise customers. Google GKE On-Prem is out soon. I never see Azure Stack mentioned so maybe Microsoft will look into a Docker acquisition to boost their enterprise footprint. The cloud seems like the bigger growth area though so perhaps this On-Prem container platform land grab will be short lived.

cwyers 8y ago
Microsoft is clearly investing in Docker, they bought Deis already. http://venturebeat.com/2017/04/10/microosoft-acquires-kubernetes-experts-deis-from-engine-yard/ http://venturebeat.com/2017/04/10/microosoft-acquires-kubern...
WorldMaker 8y ago
> I never see Azure Stack mentioned so maybe Microsoft will look into a Docker acquisition to boost their enterprise footprint. The companies using Azure Stack today are some of the least likely to be parroting that fact. Microsoft's on-prem is pretty well entrenched, particularly in "boring enterprise" where pragmatism beats idealism, are quiet "do the work, don't leak the work" more than proudly proclaim to be chasing the trends. That said, Azure Stack (and Azure) already have strong Docker support, without an acquisition to date. More interestingly, in my opinion, though, is that right now Azure Functions is the only "serverless" runtime with a strong open source story, and equally strong on-prem (both as part of Azure Stack and, increasingly from what I hear, standalone) as well as Cloud support.

crunchlibrarian 8y ago

Last quarter IBM had free cash flow of 2.2B. They spent 2.1B of that on stock buybacks and dividends You can't really hide your lack of R&D or missing long term vision with numbers like that.

yangikan 8y ago
Free cash flow is after R&D expenses.

mawburn 8y ago

IBM patents everything. I feel like if they were to ever actually go through their death throes, they will start becoming patent trolls.

jacquesm 8y ago
Or get bought by patent trolls. They're big enough that that future is hopefully a long time off. It is the last stage of any large company anyway: IP vulture.

nobody271 8y ago

Would you mind entertaining a naive question? What makes redhat worth it? What would make a company choose redhat over Ubuntu (or any flavor of Debian) in 2018?

lima 8y ago
RHEL's quality assurance and documentation is top-notch. Ubuntu has been improving, but it's not anywhere as good (which makes sense - Red Hat has much more people working on it). Support is expensive, but worth it. It's not unheard of to get custom kernel patches mere days after you reported an issue. Well, that and the ecosystem of enterprise software which refuse to run on anything but RHEL. And Ubuntu's failure to establish their home-grown stuff: Upstart, Unity, Mir, Ubuntu One, Ubuntu Phone, Juju... That being said, 18.04 is a lot better than 12.04 or 14.04. I'm a Red Hat fan, but I hope Canonical succeeds - the more independent companies there are, the better.
- secfirstmd 8y ago
  Unless it gets bought by MS
ilovecaching 8y ago
I've never seen Ubuntu used in a large enterprise. Redhat dominates the server market. They offer better certification, support, and a package repository geared towards stability and backporting. The seperate Fedora (new a shiny) from RHEL (old and stable). Ubuntu doesn't really have that distinction. Shuttleworth is also kind of a character, and it's hard to rely on him keeping Ubuntu fixed on a particular use case. It's been desktop, then mobile/desktop convergence, and now containers and Kuberentes. Think startup vs big business.
- jacques_chester 8y ago
  Ubuntu is the default base image for Cloud Foundry, so in fact it's pretty widely embedded in enterprise at this point. But it's an implementation detail, rather than a separate line item on the invoice.

toredash 8y ago

As a so-called "long cert taker", I would expect you to be able to write the name right: Red Hat

mathattack 8y ago

RedHat seems to have already adopted IBM’s approach of “milk the customer base.” They belong together, as neither is a big growth play any more.

ChuckMcM 8y ago

IBM isn't sinking. It is quite large, nearly 400,000 employees. If they laid off 10% of their workforce it would be like a bit more than 1 and a half Facebooks ceased to exist but it would be a drop in the bucket at IBM. What they are is slow moving and hidebound. I think that at some level they understand that, and at other levels they don't. They have an amazing asset in their labs where they can put 1,000 of some of the smartest people you might ever hope to meet on to a problem pretty much instantly. In my short time with them post acquisition I found a company that was very slowly losing its calcified husk and becoming more agile. It had some blind spots but when you replace enough people that can be fixed. As Gerstner showed in the 90's, as Satella is showing at Microsoft, what Welch showed at GE. Put the right leadership team in place and you can do amazing things with that power.

B1FF_PSUVM 8y ago
> Welch showed at GE I thought his contribution was "rank and yank" and financial services, both dubious to say the least. Have I been misled?
- pinewurst 8y ago
  No, you weren't misled. Welch was/is a prime example of the primacy of personal selfishness applied to corporate management.
user5994461 8y ago
It's all contractors being sub contracted to other companies. If they laid off 10% of their workers overnight it wouldn't matter because it's the normal cycle of contracting. There can be no growth because contractors don't scale. They bring a fix percentage of their day rate. There could be some products with great people lost in a corner of IBM. However, they will remain a negligible fraction of the company and they won't have the power to turn it around. If AWS/Microsoft makes a new product or service, they can roll out instantly everywhere and capture clients. If IBM does something new, they couldn't begin to sell it, they'd sell you a contractor.
- 8y ago

robbiemitchell 8y ago

How would you feel about Redhat if it stayed independent? It sounds like they were in trouble.