38 ms·
IBM to acquire Confluent
- jituyadav 10mo agois it good or bad for confluent employees?
- rvz 10mo agoBoth. IBM will likely give Confluent employees a large pay package, and then let them go after the merger.
- vb-8448 10mo agoThey will get some money in the short term, but they better start looking for another job edit: btw, it's typical for any acquisition/merger
- xocnad 10mo agoFrom experience, and to slightly refute the sibling replied, good for the confluent peeps that get flagged as being essential to the acquisition, they'll get a retention bonus of 100-300% of base pay spread over three years. The cutting of staff will begin likely in the 3-5 year time frame.
- abtinf 10mo agoIt depends a lot on which org they go into, and the motivations of the P&L owner of that division. IBM is a really big and diverse company, in a way fundamentally different from most other big tech. In a sense, it is completely incoherent to refer to them as a singular entity. My opinions are my own. I worked at IBM like a decade ago in a role where I could see the radically different motivations of divisions.
- paxys 10mo agoIBM paid a ~30% premium on the current stock price, so all shareholders (I imagine employees own a bunch of shares) will get a decent chunk of cash. Some redundant departments (HR, finance, accounting and the like) will be downsized after the acquisition. Engineering and product will be unaffected in the short term, but in a year or two the IBM culture will start to seep in, and that would be a good time for tenured employees to start planning their exits. That's also when lock-up agreements will expire and the existing leadership of Confluent will depart and be replaced by IBM execs.
- CyanLite2 10mo agoAnd sales teams will likely be forced to cross-sell IBM Products.
- pm90 10mo agoIPO'd at 45, high of 90ish, sold at 30. It depends on the strike price for employees, but its not clear if its universally a good outcome.
- deleted 10mo ago[deleted]
- itsanaccount 10mo agoAnd the enshittification treadmill continues. Great time to be a kafka alternative. I'll start. https://github.com/tansu-io/tansu https://github.com/tansu-io/tansu
- gooob 10mo agowait what's wrong with kafka?
- itslennysfault 10mo agoWhat's wrong with kafka or what WILL BE wrong with kafka?
- PeterCorless 10mo agoSo much that we presume in the modern cloud wasn't a given when Apache Kafka was first released in 2011. kevstev wrote just above about Kafka being written to run on spinning disks (HDDs), while Redpanda was written to take advantage of the latest hardware (local NVMe SSDs). He has some great insights. As well, Apache Kafka was written in Java, back in an era when you were weren't quite sure what operating system you might be running on. For example, when Azure first launched they had a Windows NT-based system called Windows Azure. Most everyone else had already decided to roll Linux. Microsoft refused to budge on Linux until 2014, and didn't release its own Azure Linux until 2020. Once everyone decided to roll Linux, the "write once run everywhere" promise of Java was obviated. But because you were still locked into a Java Virtual Machine (JVM) your application couldn't optimize itself to the underlying hardware and operating system you were running on. Redpanda, for example, is written in C++ on top of the Seastar framework (seastar.io). The same framework at the heart of ScyllaDB. This engine is a thread-per-core shared-nothing architecture that allows Redpanda to optimize performance for hardware utilization in ways that a Java app can only dream of. CPU utilization, memory usage, IO throughput. It's all just better performance on Redpanda. It means that you're actually getting better utility out of the servers you deploy. Less wasted / fallow CPU cycles — so better price-performance. Faster writes. Lower p99 latencies. It's just... better. Now, I am biased. I work at Redpanda now. But I've been a big fan of Kafka since 2015. I am still bullish on data streaming. I just think that Apache Kafka, as a Java-based platform, needs some serious rearchitecture, Even Confluent doesn't use vanilla Kafka. They rewrote their own engine, Kora. They claim it is 10x faster. Or 30x faster. Depending on what you're measuring. 1. https://www.confluent.io/confluent-cloud/kora/ https://www.confluent.io/confluent-cloud/kora/ 2. https://www.confluent.io/blog/10x-apache-kafka-elasticity/ https://www.confluent.io/blog/10x-apache-kafka-elasticity/
- mistercheph 10mo agoAnother genius move from International Business Machines!
- zkmon 10mo agoKafka is already past it's prime time. Time for new solutions for the oldest problem - sending a message.
- slekker 10mo agoErlang/OTP!
- spyspy 10mo agoI'm still convinced the vast majority of kafka implementations could be replaced with `SELECT * FROM mytable ORDER BY timestamp ASC`
- devnull3 10mo agoThat is exactly what I am doing with sqlite. Have a table level seqno as monotonically increasing number stamped for every mutation. When a subscriber connects it asks for rows > Subscriber's seqno-last-handled.
- fatal94 10mo agoSure, if you're working on a small homelab with minimal to no processing volume. The second you approach any kind of scale, this falls apart and/or you end up with a more expensive and worse version of Kafka.
- devnull3 10mo agoI think there is a wide spectrum between small-homelab and google scale. I was surprised how far sqlite goes with some sharding on modern SSDs for those in-between scale services/saas
- fatal94 10mo agoWhat you're doing is fine for a homelab, or learning. But barring any very specific reason other than just not liking Kafka, its bad. The second that pattern needs to be fanned out to support even 50+ producers/consumers, the overhead and complexity needed to manage already-solved problems becomes a very bad design choice. Kafka already solves this problem and gives me message durability, near infinite scale out, sharding, delivery guarantees, etc out of the box. I do not care to develop, reshard databases or production-alize this myself.
- jhickok 10mo ago“With the acquisition of Confluent, IBM will provide the smart data platform for enterprise IT, purpose-built for AI.” https://newsroom.ibm.com/2025-12-08-ibm-to-acquire-confluent-to-create-smart-data-platform-for-enterprise-generative-ai https://newsroom.ibm.com/2025-12-08-ibm-to-acquire-confluent... I don't understand how this acquisition is relevant for AI.
- exsomet 10mo agoEvery time an executive says AI the number goes up.
- sceadu 10mo agoAlways Increasing
- oedemis 10mo agoStreaming, EDA can solve lot of data challenges for enterprise AI use cases
- kitd 10mo agoEvent-driven AI decision making is the C-suite wet dream. A large % of major orgs run Kafka for their eventing systems.
- jhickok 10mo agoSo the idea is sorta watching the wire of streaming data with autonomous agents or something like that?
- kitd 10mo agoExactly. An agent may be acting on the contents of individual events, but also spotting trends and patterns in events, and intervening where needed/instructed.
- 10mo ago
- udev4096 10mo ago[flagged]
- hadrien01 10mo agoGenuine question: how did the IBM acquisitions of Red Hat and HashiCorp turn out? For Red Hat, there's no longer an official "public" distribution of RHEL, but apart from that they seemingly have been left alone and able to continue to develop their own products. But that's only my POV as a user of OSS Red Hat products at home and of RHEL and OpenShift at work.
- EarthIsHome 10mo agoGnome has stagnated significantly.
- tannhaeuser 10mo agoIf only it had stagnated around gnome 2.0.
- tristan957 10mo agoMATE exists. You can use it right now.
- nextaccountic 10mo agoI do. It's great that the UI is stagnated, but unfortunately the UX is too. Things like bluetooth not being integrated with the DE, and various details that we take for granted not working correctly
- throw10920 10mo agoCould that be due to increased popularity of KDE?
- phkahler 10mo ago>> Gnome has stagnated significantly. GTK is still alive. It seems like Cosmic desktop with GTK apps will be a reasonable path forward. Of course there's KDE and QT, but I mean as an alternative to those.
- leeoniya 10mo agopreviously... https://www.confluent.io/blog/confluent-acquires-warpstream/ https://www.confluent.io/blog/confluent-acquires-warpstream/
- enether 10mo agoWarpstream (by Confluent (an IBM company))
- elcapitan 10mo agoAt least you can now safely buy into Kafka, as nobody ever got fired for buying IBM.
- notepad0x90 10mo agoThis isn't the old times, you can expect the opposite outcome these days.
- kevstev 10mo agoOP IMHO was obviously being sarcastic.
- notepad0x90 10mo agoFair.
- antonvs 10mo agoI know companies who would certainly have fired people for buying IBM, if they could have gone back in time to do so.
- b33f 10mo agoMaybe a good time to consider alternatives https://www.redpanda.com/compare/redpanda-vs-kafka https://www.redpanda.com/compare/redpanda-vs-kafka
- mliezun 10mo agoMaybe this whole thing it's because Snowflake acquired redpanda earlier this year: https://www.investors.com/news/technology/snowflake-stock-redpanda-acquisition-impact-confluent/ https://www.investors.com/news/technology/snowflake-stock-re...
- tapoxi 10mo agoWe switched to Redpanda's BYOC product because we couldn't use Confluent Cloud (contractual reasons) and BYOC was a third the price of Confluent for Kubernetes while also being a managed service. I've been pretty happy with RP performance/cost/functionality wise. It isn't Kafka though, it's a proprietary C++ rewrite that aims for 100% compatibility. This hasn't been an issue in the 2+ years since we migrated prod, but YMMV.
- dangoldin 10mo agoI led the engineering team of a large adtech company (TripleLift - order of hundreds of billions of events/day) and we evolved from self hosting Kafka, to paying a vendor (Instacluster), to migrating to RedPanda. RedPanda was a huge win for us. Confluent never made sense to us since we were always so cost conscious but the complexity/risk of managing a critical part of our infra was always something I worried about. RedPanda was able to handle both for us - cheaper than Kafka hosting vendors with significantly better performance. We were pretty early customers but was a huge win for us.
- geodel 10mo agoThis is great news. Kafka (the messaging/streaming platform) has finally found its natural home.
- notepad0x90 10mo agoThis is so fascinating to me. I mean how IBM keeps taking over other companies, but they consistently deliver low quality/bottom-tier services and products. Why do they keep doing the same thing again and again? How are they generating actual revenue this way? Ok, so does anyone remember 'Watson'? It was the chatgpt before chatgpt. they built it in house. Why didn't they compete with OpenAI like Google and Anthropic are doing, with in-house tools? They have a mature PowerPC (Power9+? now?)setup, lots of talent to make ML/LLMs work and lots of existing investment in datacenters and getting GPU-intense workloads going. I don't disagree that this acquisition is good strategy, I'm just fascinated (Schadenfreude?) to witness the demise of confluent now. I think economists should study this, it might help avert larger problems.
- SV_BubbleTime 10mo agoI’m pretty convinced there is a bell curve of “understanding what IBM does” where idiots and geniuses both have absolutely no idea. It really is probably that strangest company in tech which you think could be mysterious and intriguing. But no one cares. It’s like no one wants to look behind the boring suit and see wtf. From my low point on that bell curve I can’t see how they are even solvent.
- embedding-shape 10mo agoYour fascination seems hinged on the fact that IBM has "lots of talent to make ML/LLMs work" which judging by what they've put out so far and talk publicly about, is very far from the truth. Anyone who has a clue seems to (rightly) have left IBM decades ago, and left are business people who think "Managed to increase margin by 0.1%" is something to celebrate.
- notepad0x90 10mo agoTo be a bit more candid, they have lots of employees outside of the US (particularly in India). and both in the US and elsewhere, people need to eat. They may not have the talent to innovate new tech like OpenAI and others, or do cutting-edge R&D, but they certainly have the talent to take LLM breakthroughs and adapt. They could have competed with many of the B-Tier LLM services out there with the right leadership.
- JSR_FDED 10mo agoIBM have an absolutely stellar record of blowing acquisitions. The highly motivated newly acquired team will be in honeymoon phase for 3 months, and then it slowly dawns on them that they’ve joined an unbelievably rigid organization where things like customer satisfaction and great products don’t matter at all. Then they’ll be in shock and disbelief at the mind boggling Byzantine rules and internal systems they have to use, whose sole purpose is to make sure nobody does anything. Finally, the core IBM sales force will start to make demands on them and will short to ground any vestiges of energy, time, opportunity and motivation they might have left. The good team members will leave and join a former business partner, or decide to spend more time with the family. They’ll meet often at the beginning to relive the glory days of pre-acquisition and recount times where they went went above and beyond for that important early customer. But then these meetings will become fewer and fewer. Finally they’ll find a way of massaging their resumes to cast the last years as being “at the heart of AI infrastructure”.
- coliveira 10mo agoIBM is designed to milk every last bit of money from their clients. So they need to add new products every now and then to add new money flows.
- embedding-shape 10mo agoSurely by now everyone, including non-developers and non-software people, know exactly what IBM is, and you don't sell to IBM/join IBM without knowing exactly what's about to happen. No one joins IBM today and thinks there will be a huge focus on customer satisfaction or focus on great product design, it's all about squeezing maximum profit out of products until you need to discontinue them because you chased away all of the customers.
- oersted 10mo agoNot wrong but the image that people are painting in the comments is getting close to a caricature now. The stuff IBM is doing on Quantum Computing is serious cutting-edge science and engineering for instance. The R&D they are doing on semiconductors on their 2nm and sub-2nm processes is also impressive and hardcore tech. They are doing a bunch of progress on post-quantum cryptography and homomorphic encryption. They've fallen behind now, but they were also quite strong on pre-LLM NLP for a couple of decades, it was not all fluff. Yes they have an awful enterprise culture and they are not focused on building excellent products. But what they offer fits the needs of many organizations, and a lot of the things they are doing on R&D are no joke.
- shrubble 10mo agoIBM is buying market share, not a surprise; at least one telecom has all their Kafka stuff on the Confluent cloud, and there must be 1000s of such customers.
- theta_d 10mo agoI worked for IBM Cloud about 6+ years ago. While there, we had to connect to a Softlayer VPN to get into our Jira instance. My VPN account and Jira account never got provisioned so I couldn't connect nor see the Jira board. My team-mates couldn't even assign a ticket to me b/c of this. They would just put my initial's in the ticket summary and send me a slack of the details. It was right before I left that we got our own Jira instance. This was all around the time of the Red Hat acquisition. I remember the announcement b/c we used SuSE for everything IIRC.
- askafriend 10mo agoWhy didn't you ask to get the accounts provisioned?
- Reubachi 10mo agoI imagine that's done via JIRA tcket/IT before onboarding. So if they somehow can get past initial device deployment/user account logon, and get other resources IE; slack....well that speaks to how difficult/pointless it would be to get proper VPN/Jira access.
- theta_d 10mo agoI believe it was an ancient ServiceNow incantation that all the current employees couldn't seem to hunt down.
- esafak 10mo agoYou'd have to be able to find the person to do that first hehe!
- ecshafer 10mo agoWhat's the largest company you've worked for? A lot of big, older companies, are just so messed up that its just not worth it. How do you do this? Well you have to find the specific form, or specific person who does the thing, who is that? no one knows. So that provisioning of a vpn and getting in jira might literally be like a month of work.
- rwmj 10mo agoHow is this different from Apache Qpid or RabbitMQ or IBM MQ (at least the first and third of those is already owned by IBM!)
- orthoxerox 10mo agoIf you're serious, Kafka is a topic-centric message bus. Everything is a topic, not a queue, and its internals are optimized to achieve very quick at-least-once delivery.
- lucketone 10mo agoIf you use Kafka as a queue, then no difference. (Load balance a message between consumers) But you can also use Kafka as pub-sub system (duplicate messages to each subscribers) Messages are not deleted after consumption (configurable)
- ekropotin 10mo agoCould anyone please explain what IBM is even doing these days? Where revenue is coming from?
- stuff4ben 10mo agoit's a public company, read the quarterly reports
- hjaveed 10mo agogood for the founding team! Kafka is an enterprise bloat. most of the queueing solutions could be built with something much simpler
- gtirloni 10mo agoIf Apache Foundation is where open source projects go to die (a bit unfair though), IBM is the equivalent for for-profit companies.
- deniscoady 10mo agoIf Apache Foundation is where open source projects go to die ... I can't think of a better place for longevity of open source projects than Apache (maybe I'm out of the loop?). Compare it to the Linux Foundation where everything is a single commercial vendor sponsored project. At lease Apache requires independent governance and a diverse ecosystem before the project graduates. Am I missing something with the Apache Foundation?
- gtirloni 10mo agoNo, you're right. That's why I said it's a bit unfair to say that. But that's the meme.
- belter 10mo agoThis is so funny. Now CNBC says "...The addition of Confluence will strengthen IBM’s artificial intelligence portfolio..." Since when is streaming event logs AI? Am I taking crazy pills?
- rileymichael 10mo agoibm also acquired datastax (managed pulsar) this year. building on top of these specialized managed service providers is becoming increasingly risky. at this point i'd rather use one of the kneecapped cloud provider offerings if possible (azure event hubs / aws msk / etc.) than risk being extorted in a few years as the result of some acquisition. at least you can work around the limitations.. anyone have an idea on how streamnative is doing? we're considering them for managed pulsar and unfortunately nobody else is in the game
- DebtDeflation 10mo agoAnd two years prior IBM acquired Ahana (PrestoDB SaaS). Totally agree that businesses need to much more carefully assess the risks of moving to these hosted open source platforms. Reminds me of when over a decade ago companies moved to Snowflake for their DWs because "our Teradata costs are out of control".
- alvarostreamo 10mo ago> anyone have an idea on how streamnative is doing? we keep pushing Pulsar and moving things - https://streamnative.io/blog/ursa-wins-vldb-2025-best-industry-paper-the-first-lakehouse-native-streaming-engine-for-kafka https://streamnative.io/blog/ursa-wins-vldb-2025-best-indust...
- ChrisArchitect 10mo agoSome market reaction Confluent stock soars 29% as IBM announces $11B acquisition deal https://www.cnbc.com/2025/12/08/ibm-confluent-deal-data.html https://www.cnbc.com/2025/12/08/ibm-confluent-deal-data.html
- jarym 10mo agoLet the Bluewashing begin. Everything will be WebSphere-first and then WebSphere-only.
- jcims 10mo agoIBM was teabagging the Hasicorp booth at re:Invent with conspicuously old hardware set out like a museum piece. Ugh.
- School-Cotton 10mo agoWhat does this mean?
- phyzome 10mo agoDo you mean sandbagging?
- Zigurd 10mo agoIt's like how lots of species evolve into crabs, or crab like things. Instead of dying out evolutionarily, failed giants like IBM evolve into Computer Associates.
- semessier 10mo agothe price sounds a little bit high from a technical perspective
- purplezooey 10mo agoAdjacent space, but can't help but wonder why Confluent did so much better than MapR
- btown 10mo agohttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20053188 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20053188 and https://www.computerweekly.com/news/252468013/MapR-collapse-into-HPE-harbinger-of-big-data-tech-trough-of-despair https://www.computerweekly.com/news/252468013/MapR-collapse-... have some context on MapR's demise. IMO they were simultaneously worse situated for near-real-time stream processing and for S3-esque cloud storage, areas Kafka and Confluent excelled.
- npalli 10mo agoConfluent was trading at less than 50% of its IPO price when IBM made the offer. The stock and the company has been going sideways for several years now, keeps growing revenues but loses even more as most of it is in Sales and Marketing. In which world is this seen as some sort of extraordinary company that will get sabotaged by IBM. Seems Confluent management knows the writing on the wall, IBM will clean up (fire a bunch of sales and management guys) and make this a workable business. It will seem brutal for some Confluent guys but that's because their business is broken; and only someone from outside can come in and fix it as the current senior management cannot. IBM has been around for over a hundred years, maybe they know a thing or two about running a software business :-)
- deleted 10mo ago[deleted]
- VonGuard 10mo agoNot a Hacker News take I would have expected 10 years ago. Today, though. I agree.
- Bayko 10mo agoTo me it makes sense when it comes to the stock. It's not like someone goes to Robinhood or whatever and goes... Hey you know what's underrated? Kafka! Calls on Confluent!
- beachy 10mo agoI joined IBM over 40 years ago, like my pappy before me. My main takeaway from IBM's longevity is just how astonishingly long big companys' death rattles can be, not how great IBM are at running software businesses.
- z3ratul163071 10mo agoexactly
- dingnuts 10mo ago[dead]
- curiosity42 10mo agoThe only way (95%+) companies selling to enterprises survive are if they get bought by a bigger platform and the sales force of the bigger platform just has to sell an extra line item. If you want to make money, track companies that have sales and marketing expenses same order / same / higher than revenue and then create a synthetic index of these companies (they need to have sold something like $1BN in license in aggregate over time - maintenance stream and you confirm that the pig can be sold somehow) . most will be eventually sold at a premium to their traded price.
- PeterCorless 10mo agoI have thought quite a bit today about the news from Confluent and IBM. I have friends and colleagues at both companies. When I was an undergrad at Carnegie Mellon University in the 1980s I used to wear a big brown and tan IBM button that said "THINK." And here is a picture of Ben Lorica 罗瑞卡 interviewing Jay Kreps and other industry leaders at The Hive back on the evening of 25 February 2015. I believe they were talking about strategies for implementing Lambda Architecture. All of which is to say: I have been a big fan of both companies for a long, long time. While today I am at employed at Redpanda Data, a direct competitor of Confluent, I hope to set aside any "team"-based bias to provide a sober and honest appraisal. First, IBM has been shrinking. They were at 345,000 employees as of their 2020 Annual Report. But the COVID-19 pandemic was only one of many setbacks the company faced when Arvind Krishna took the helm as CEO. By December 2024 the employee base shrank to 270,000 — a drop of nearly 22%. IBM revenue in 2020: $73.6B. IBM revenue in 2024: $62.75B — a less-precipitous drop of 15%. Revenue per employee over that period rose from $213k to $232k. Confluent on its own? $400k. And to compare: Amazon earns $580k per employee. Microsoft generates over $1M per. Nvidia? $4M-$5M. And now, in November, they announced thousands of more layoffs. No one seems safe, regardless of job title. Those cut include positions in "artificial intelligence, marketing, software engineering and cloud technology." Next, IBM has had a mixed record as a steward of acquisitions. Red Hat has doubled in revenues since their 2019 acquisition. For a while its headcount continued to grow, as much as 19,000 by 2023. But then it was forced into layoffs by parent IBM in April of that year, and then each year since, even while it remains one of the highest margin businesses in their portfolio. SoftLayer — "IBM Cloud Classic" — also suffered significant layoffs in early 2025, with offshoring sending jobs to India. DataStax had layoffs in 2023-2024, even before its acquisition was announced. Maybe they were "trimming the fat" to get into a shape to be acquired. As a person with a long career in marketing, I know that many of the first roles to be jettisoned at a newly-acquired company tend to be in go-to-market organizations. Sales, Marketing, Developer Relations, Documentation, Training, Community, Customer Service. These tend to be seen as "nice to haves" by upper management. But their loss guts organizations and hollows out user-facing teams and open source communities. My hope is that Confluent is spared as much of the pain and turmoil as possible. That, like Red Hat, it is run autonomously as much as possible. [Crossposted from LinkedIn here, where you can see the photo mentioned: https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7404052603363508225/ https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7404052...]
- semessier 10mo ago11 billion invested in multiple hardware developments including moonshots would have been more sensible that for Kafka operator (remember MQSeries/MQ btw)
- moulick 10mo agoConfluent had great stuff but their prices were crazy. When we got a quote from them, it was 20x more than what we could run on our own. We got quoted something like ~500k/year and my math on running it on AWS came around 25k for the same sized cluster via Strimzi operator on dedicated K8s nodes. We could hire a dedicated 3 person team to manage the cluster for the same price lol. Now AWS is eating Confluent's lunch with it's managed Kafka. AWS MSK is still a little rough like all AWS services but it's still cheaper and a no-brainer if you are already on AWS.
- lz400 10mo agoI have similar stories, I showed the Confluent consultants a projection of their Kafka quote vs Kinesis and it was like 10x, even they were confused. The ingress/egress costs are insane. I think they just do very deep discounts to certain customers. The product is good but if you pay full ticket it probably doesn't make sense.
- jsumrall 10mo agoSeems like a great day for Pulsar / StreamNative and Redpanda who are going to get a lot of new customers in the coming years. When looking for alternatives to Kafka these are the most promising options I found, not counting RabbitMQ which needs no introduction. Pulsar seems to be 'kafka done better'. The version of Kafka that Confluent used internally (Kora) seems closer to Pular as well. Pulsar has a lot of features that Kafka doesn't have, like per-message acknowledgement, similar to RabbitMQ. And it has protocol support for RabbitMQ and Kafka, so can be a drop-in replacement. Redpanda seems like a great re-implementation of Kafka. I'm hoping this boosts Pulsar's status and helps get some traction for StreamNative. It seems like the best technical solution for events and messaging. It just needs a bit more market adoption to make an easier choice for enterprise, in my opinion. This might be that moment. https://streamnative.io/ https://streamnative.io/ *(yes I know about NATS)
- YouAreWRONGtoo 10mo ago[dead]
- David_0101 10mo ago[dead]
- SigurdLeuther 10mo ago[dead]