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This is a great move for both companies. The doom and gloom in this thread is depressing. RedHat gets access to IBMs massive sales machine and IBM picks up a n

This is a great move for both companies. The doom and gloom in this thread is depressing. RedHat gets access to IBMs massive sales machine and IBM picks up a number of key technologies. Win-win.

ilovecaching 7y ago
People are horrified because IBM is a sinking ship and a monolithic big business that will attempt to look at everything from a fiscal perspective with no real love for what made Redhat great. Is IBM really going to give Systemd, Fedora, the full time kernel maintainers a break and pay them to make “unprofitable” software? We’re also seeing the end of independence that was making the open source model work with dignity. It was a huge milestone for the company and many people view this as a regression.
- lonelappde 7y ago
  What's the antibody response? Can someone else pick up the mantle of wrapping Fedora in an Enterprise offering?
- rusticpenn 7y ago
  IBM spends so much on R&D. I am not sure if the company is solely focussed on short term profits.
  - fny 7y ago
    IBM spends a fraction of what other household names spend. > That’s according to an analysis by Recode, which found the e-commerce giant [Amazon] spent nearly $23 billion on R&D in 2017. Technology companies rounded out the top five, collectively spending $76 billion on R&D last year. The other tech companies that spent the most on R&D were Alphabet (GOOG), Intel Corp. (INTC), Microsoft Corp. (MSFT) and Apple Inc. (AAPL). Alphabet was in second place with R&D spending of $16.6 billion while Intel had spending of $13.1 billion and Microsoft spent $12.3 billion. Apple rounded out the top five with $11.6 billion. Meanwhile, Johnson & Johnson (JNJ) spent $10.4 billion while Ford Motor Co. (F) weighed in with 2017 R&D spending of $8 billion. Potentially telling, International Business Machines Corp. (IBM), once the innovator in techland, spent the least at $5.4 billion. (See also: IBM Traders See Stock Plunging 20%.) [0]: https://www.investopedia.com/news/amazons-23b-rd-budget-sets-record-recode/ https://www.investopedia.com/news/amazons-23b-rd-budget-sets...
    - kortilla 7y ago
      So half of what Apple spent? That’s hardly damning.
    - jpalomaki 7y ago
      Just to note, the Amazon figure does not seem to be comparable to others. Amazon does not report R&D spend, but “Technology and content” spend. This includes for example AWS infrastructure. https://www.fool.com/investing/2018/06/13/how-much-does-amazon-spend-on-rd-less-than-you-thi.aspx https://www.fool.com/investing/2018/06/13/how-much-does-amaz...
  - opportune 7y ago
    "R&D" is a bit of a misnomer in the software world. Lots of things are technically R&D that you wouldn't think of as R&D
duxup 7y ago
IBM has been stumbling around trying to find its feet again for a while now. It seems possible that despite the advantages you cite that IBM won't know how to use them. Word from the inside is that IBM's own "sales machine" selling Watson for what it really wasn't ... was a great deal of the problem with Watson. The skepticism about IBM is rooted in their recent history.
- logosmonkey 7y ago
  Yeah, I have worked for two companies that were sold Watson as a cure all for their problems. I have never seen it actually do much of anything. Definitely nothing that could not be done with any old set of etl tools.
- asdf21 7y ago
  Yeah, whatever happened to Watson? I haven't really heard much in a couple years now..
  - duxup 7y ago
    Word from the inside is that to successfully utilize Watson a lot of careful work has to be done with managing and formatting data... and to some extent experimentation for any given solution. This requires a lot of time from IBM, and a lot of time / resources from the company who buys it. However, Watson was sold and advertised as more of a drop in solution with a lot promised of results that Watson has never produced. Accordingly the massive costs incurred by customers were unexpected and the processes to do it right rushed, customer expectations were not met (quite the opposite) and the results were often quite poor. IBM seems to have backed away from all those grand claims.
  - vikramkr 7y ago
    Most healthcare professionals I've spoken to consider it an absolute joke, it's apparently a bit of a laughingstock compared to its grand claims of diagnosing all the cancers
  - DebtDeflation 7y ago
    It's still around, but now it's generally being sold as what it actually is - an NLP framework for building chatbots and search engines - as opposed to magic sentient AGI that can solve any problem.
magduf 7y ago
Yeah, it'll be great. I can't wait until IBM pushes Red Hat customers to migrate from git to IBM Rational ClearCase.
devonkim 7y ago
The problem with any M&A is no different than what happens in marriages - do the two blend together, does one dominate the other's culture, etc? The truth is that IBM's history (and to be fair, almost all 10-figure+ market cap tech companies) even with multi-billion dollar acquisitions (that's almost all they do with the exception of Google and Apple I can think off the top of my head) is that the current company's inertia dominates whoever they acquire and the internal sales-driven culture in developed markets supersedes anything resembling engineering related from a company they acquire. Sometimes IBM gets ripped off too but wishful-thinking top-down thinking instead of a more critical, measured engineering oriented focus is typically not consulted even for absolutely essential company initiatives internally. Disclaimer: former IBM employee with short tenure with a failed acquisition by every definition of it
- pmoriarty 7y ago
  "the current company's inertia dominates whoever they acquire and the internal sales-driven culture in developed markets supersedes anything resembling engineering related from a company they acquire" What engineering-related innovation has RedHat come up with? As a Linux sysadmin I've noticed that all of the companies I've worked at that have used RedHat chose it not because it was innovative but because: 1 - they could get a support contract 2 - because RH dominated the commercial Linux space 3 - because RH was the OS the admins knew and both wanted to leverage that knowledge and keep their knowledge current for continuing work with this market leader in future jobs (as that was likely the OS they'd use in most jobs to come) Most of the "innovations" I can attribute to RH have been widely seen in the sysadmin community as negative. Innovations such as systemd, Network Manager, and selinux. The latter two we've often turned off because they caused so many problems. Unfortunately, systemd was too integrated in to the OS to be able to turn off. There's RPM, but that was created decades ago when RH was not the company it was now, and it's just one packaging format out of many, and not one that IBM even needs to spend billions to buy. The only other positive tech that RH owns that I can think of is Ansible. But they didn't create it. They bought it. What RH-originated innovations should we impressed by?
  - pstch 7y ago
eitally 7y ago
I think the challenge is that the IBM team have been literally selling products competing directly (but far less well) with what RH has on their truck. IBM+RH need to formulate and socialize a clear and consistent cloud, product & consulting strategy ... and then they can execute. If they get this out there quickly, they are likely to do quite well. If not -- and this seems more likely, given they should have had this material ready before announcing their intent to acquire -- I'm less confident.
johnvanommen 7y ago
> This is a great move for both companies. The doom and gloom in this thread is depressing. RedHat gets access to IBMs massive sales machine and IBM picks up a number of key technologies. Win-win. If you review HP's acquisitions, you can see the "worst case scenario." IE, what if they just drive the acquisition into a ditch? When I worked at HP, we saw lots of customers who needed automation software, and it seemed like nobody at HP was even aware that we offered a competitive product. (Opsware aka "hp server automation.") https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_acquisitions_by_Hewlett-Packard https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_acquisitions_by_Hewlet...

This is a great move for both companies. The doom and gloom in this thread is depressing. RedHat gets access to IBMs massive sales machine and IBM picks up a number of key technologies. Win-win.

ilovecaching 7y ago

People are horrified because IBM is a sinking ship and a monolithic big business that will attempt to look at everything from a fiscal perspective with no real love for what made Redhat great. Is IBM really going to give Systemd, Fedora, the full time kernel maintainers a break and pay them to make “unprofitable” software? We’re also seeing the end of independence that was making the open source model work with dignity. It was a huge milestone for the company and many people view this as a regression.

lonelappde 7y ago
What's the antibody response? Can someone else pick up the mantle of wrapping Fedora in an Enterprise offering?
rusticpenn 7y ago
IBM spends so much on R&D. I am not sure if the company is solely focussed on short term profits.
- fny 7y ago
  IBM spends a fraction of what other household names spend. > That’s according to an analysis by Recode, which found the e-commerce giant [Amazon] spent nearly $23 billion on R&D in 2017. Technology companies rounded out the top five, collectively spending $76 billion on R&D last year. The other tech companies that spent the most on R&D were Alphabet (GOOG), Intel Corp. (INTC), Microsoft Corp. (MSFT) and Apple Inc. (AAPL). Alphabet was in second place with R&D spending of $16.6 billion while Intel had spending of $13.1 billion and Microsoft spent $12.3 billion. Apple rounded out the top five with $11.6 billion. Meanwhile, Johnson & Johnson (JNJ) spent $10.4 billion while Ford Motor Co. (F) weighed in with 2017 R&D spending of $8 billion. Potentially telling, International Business Machines Corp. (IBM), once the innovator in techland, spent the least at $5.4 billion. (See also: IBM Traders See Stock Plunging 20%.) [0]: https://www.investopedia.com/news/amazons-23b-rd-budget-sets-record-recode/ https://www.investopedia.com/news/amazons-23b-rd-budget-sets...
  - kortilla 7y ago
    So half of what Apple spent? That’s hardly damning.
  - jpalomaki 7y ago
    Just to note, the Amazon figure does not seem to be comparable to others. Amazon does not report R&D spend, but “Technology and content” spend. This includes for example AWS infrastructure. https://www.fool.com/investing/2018/06/13/how-much-does-amazon-spend-on-rd-less-than-you-thi.aspx https://www.fool.com/investing/2018/06/13/how-much-does-amaz...
- opportune 7y ago
  "R&D" is a bit of a misnomer in the software world. Lots of things are technically R&D that you wouldn't think of as R&D

duxup 7y ago

IBM has been stumbling around trying to find its feet again for a while now. It seems possible that despite the advantages you cite that IBM won't know how to use them. Word from the inside is that IBM's own "sales machine" selling Watson for what it really wasn't ... was a great deal of the problem with Watson. The skepticism about IBM is rooted in their recent history.

logosmonkey 7y ago
Yeah, I have worked for two companies that were sold Watson as a cure all for their problems. I have never seen it actually do much of anything. Definitely nothing that could not be done with any old set of etl tools.
asdf21 7y ago
Yeah, whatever happened to Watson? I haven't really heard much in a couple years now..
- duxup 7y ago
  Word from the inside is that to successfully utilize Watson a lot of careful work has to be done with managing and formatting data... and to some extent experimentation for any given solution. This requires a lot of time from IBM, and a lot of time / resources from the company who buys it. However, Watson was sold and advertised as more of a drop in solution with a lot promised of results that Watson has never produced. Accordingly the massive costs incurred by customers were unexpected and the processes to do it right rushed, customer expectations were not met (quite the opposite) and the results were often quite poor. IBM seems to have backed away from all those grand claims.
- vikramkr 7y ago
  Most healthcare professionals I've spoken to consider it an absolute joke, it's apparently a bit of a laughingstock compared to its grand claims of diagnosing all the cancers
- DebtDeflation 7y ago
  It's still around, but now it's generally being sold as what it actually is - an NLP framework for building chatbots and search engines - as opposed to magic sentient AGI that can solve any problem.

magduf 7y ago

Yeah, it'll be great. I can't wait until IBM pushes Red Hat customers to migrate from git to IBM Rational ClearCase.

devonkim 7y ago

The problem with any M&A is no different than what happens in marriages - do the two blend together, does one dominate the other's culture, etc? The truth is that IBM's history (and to be fair, almost all 10-figure+ market cap tech companies) even with multi-billion dollar acquisitions (that's almost all they do with the exception of Google and Apple I can think off the top of my head) is that the current company's inertia dominates whoever they acquire and the internal sales-driven culture in developed markets supersedes anything resembling engineering related from a company they acquire. Sometimes IBM gets ripped off too but wishful-thinking top-down thinking instead of a more critical, measured engineering oriented focus is typically not consulted even for absolutely essential company initiatives internally. Disclaimer: former IBM employee with short tenure with a failed acquisition by every definition of it

pmoriarty 7y ago
"the current company's inertia dominates whoever they acquire and the internal sales-driven culture in developed markets supersedes anything resembling engineering related from a company they acquire" What engineering-related innovation has RedHat come up with? As a Linux sysadmin I've noticed that all of the companies I've worked at that have used RedHat chose it not because it was innovative but because: 1 - they could get a support contract 2 - because RH dominated the commercial Linux space 3 - because RH was the OS the admins knew and both wanted to leverage that knowledge and keep their knowledge current for continuing work with this market leader in future jobs (as that was likely the OS they'd use in most jobs to come) Most of the "innovations" I can attribute to RH have been widely seen in the sysadmin community as negative. Innovations such as systemd, Network Manager, and selinux. The latter two we've often turned off because they caused so many problems. Unfortunately, systemd was too integrated in to the OS to be able to turn off. There's RPM, but that was created decades ago when RH was not the company it was now, and it's just one packaging format out of many, and not one that IBM even needs to spend billions to buy. The only other positive tech that RH owns that I can think of is Ansible. But they didn't create it. They bought it. What RH-originated innovations should we impressed by?
- pstch 7y ago

eitally 7y ago

I think the challenge is that the IBM team have been literally selling products competing directly (but far less well) with what RH has on their truck. IBM+RH need to formulate and socialize a clear and consistent cloud, product & consulting strategy ... and then they can execute. If they get this out there quickly, they are likely to do quite well. If not -- and this seems more likely, given they should have had this material ready before announcing their intent to acquire -- I'm less confident.

johnvanommen 7y ago

> This is a great move for both companies. The doom and gloom in this thread is depressing. RedHat gets access to IBMs massive sales machine and IBM picks up a number of key technologies. Win-win. If you review HP's acquisitions, you can see the "worst case scenario." IE, what if they just drive the acquisition into a ditch? When I worked at HP, we saw lots of customers who needed automation software, and it seemed like nobody at HP was even aware that we offered a competitive product. (Opsware aka "hp server automation.") https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_acquisitions_by_Hewlett-Packard https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_acquisitions_by_Hewlet...