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IBM bought Red Hat for OpenShift. IBM buying Red Hat was supposed to propel OpenShift and Red Hats portfolio into the C-suite connections IBM had. Instead, it

IBM bought Red Hat for OpenShift. IBM buying Red Hat was supposed to propel OpenShift and Red Hats portfolio into the C-suite connections IBM had. Instead, it seems IBM has force marched Red Hat to focus all their energies on OpenShift at the expense of their larger portfolio. OpenShift probably isn't performing as well as IBM expected, and even with 4 it still carries the "OpenShift is not Kubernetes" vibe. IBM also has a bunch of products in their portfolio that compete with Red Hat. On the IBM side, weird shit is a foot. The GTS spinoff into Khndryl is very, very bizarre. They're a profitable part of IBM but need to be excised, quickly? It's causing chaos for accounts that had deep GTS coverage as the account teams are basically adversarial. The rest of IBMs portfolio is stagnating as they chase fads and lose to niche players with better overall value. Especially with the Data/AI space, startups are killing them.

rescbr 5y ago
ex-IBMer here, product side: GTS sometimes had better private pricing and incentives for products from competitors that other business units couldn't match due to internal pricing policies. Now try explaining to the customer why IBM is recommending an IBM's competitor while IBM is also offering the same product with a better price directly to the customer. It doesn't make sense at all. Consider two service-focused business units (GTS and GBS) that sometimes are complementary but mostly adversarial and it is chaos for the customer. Spinning-off GTS (and I dare say, GBS too) is better for the customer and for the product business units.
jhickok 5y ago
Containerizing IBM's software and forcing it all on OpenShift is such a weird move to me. When you force your customers to become Kubernetes admins when all they really want is some other solution I think you have a drastically smaller target. I think a lot of Red Hatters are tired of having the IBM sales force show up in their OpenShift accounts asking about upgrading them to Cloud Paks.
- NAK21 5y ago
  Even worse is the IBM team trying to sell IBM cloud saying cloud-only is the way to go. Customer agrees and compares clouds, settles on AWS or Azure, then IBM team brings in Red Hat to pitch hybrid.

rescbr 5y ago

ex-IBMer here, product side: GTS sometimes had better private pricing and incentives for products from competitors that other business units couldn't match due to internal pricing policies. Now try explaining to the customer why IBM is recommending an IBM's competitor while IBM is also offering the same product with a better price directly to the customer. It doesn't make sense at all. Consider two service-focused business units (GTS and GBS) that sometimes are complementary but mostly adversarial and it is chaos for the customer. Spinning-off GTS (and I dare say, GBS too) is better for the customer and for the product business units.

jhickok 5y ago

Containerizing IBM's software and forcing it all on OpenShift is such a weird move to me. When you force your customers to become Kubernetes admins when all they really want is some other solution I think you have a drastically smaller target. I think a lot of Red Hatters are tired of having the IBM sales force show up in their OpenShift accounts asking about upgrading them to Cloud Paks.

NAK21 5y ago
Even worse is the IBM team trying to sell IBM cloud saying cloud-only is the way to go. Customer agrees and compares clouds, settles on AWS or Azure, then IBM team brings in Red Hat to pitch hybrid.