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Red Hat Officially Acquired By IBM

posted by Fnord666 on Tuesday July 09 2019, @11:23PM   Printer-friendly
from the now-knows-as-blue-hat dept.

hoeferbe writes:

IBM and Red Hat announced today that they have closed the transaction under which IBM acquired all of the issued and outstanding common shares of Red Hat for $190.00 per share in cash, representing a total equity value of approximately $34 billion.

The acquisition redefines the cloud market for business. Red Hat's open hybrid cloud technologies are now paired with the unmatched scale and depth of IBM's innovation and industry expertise, and sales leadership in more than 175 countries. Together, IBM and Red Hat will accelerate innovation by offering a next-generation hybrid multicloud platform. Based on open source technologies, such as Linux and Kubernetes, the platform will allow businesses to securely deploy, run and manage data and applications on-premises and on private and multiple public clouds.

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 10 2019, @04:53AM (4 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 10 2019, @04:53AM (#865287)

    Interesting comment on hackernews:

    https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20392239 [ycombinator.com]

    So IBM buys Red Hat for $34B, of which $20B are borrowed monies. The debt is priced at 1.05 percentage points above Treasury yield rate [1] which would be somewhere around 3.5% which puts interest on bond debt at ~$700m every year.

    Now consider that Red Hat had a net income of $433m. Even if they reach $500 this year, Big Blue will still be $200m short, every year.

    IBM's execs have a history of initiating layoffs solely to boost share price-- to the point that long-term viability of those areas of the company were severely damaged. There might be a blood bath at the former Redhat. Especially if IBM is only interested in Redhat's cloud business.

    I suppose they could pull an Oracle and try to extract more money out of Redhat's existing customers like Oracle tried to do with Sun's customers. If it goes down the same way, they will be former Redhat customers just like Oracle ended up losing former Sun customers due to their changes.

    It seems the least likely outcome will be Redhat increasing its revenues to make up the shortfall in those interest payments by just attracting new business.

    If Redhat fails, I wonder if the loss of the developers being paid by Redhat will be a greater negative than the positive effects of ridding the community of a corporate behemoth that has been trying more and more to dictate direction of development to suit their commercial interests at the expense of the needs/wants of the rest of the community. Of course, if they succeed, we just traded in for an even larger behemoth.

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 10 2019, @05:00AM (2 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 10 2019, @05:00AM (#865288)

    I'm told Red Hat is a good employer, but as a Linux user, I despise Red Hat. I won't shed a tear if Red Hat gets extinguished.

    Ok, I will throw a keg party if Red Hat is extinguished.

    • (Score: 2, Interesting) by r_a_trip on Wednesday July 10 2019, @08:55AM (1 child)

      by r_a_trip (5276) on Wednesday July 10 2019, @08:55AM (#865320)

      Be careful what you wish for. While Red Hat is by no means an angel, if they fall by the way side, there aren't many to fill that void. I would dread the situation of Canonical swooping in to fill that void and "start leading" in the Linux world. At least Red Hat has consistency and follow through, unlike the "throw spaghetti at the wall" methodology of Canonical.

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 10 2019, @03:14PM

        by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 10 2019, @03:14PM (#865400)

        I believe RedHat has significant business with DOD. That and the cloud are most likely the reasons for IBM's interest.

  • (Score: 3, Funny) by hendrikboom on Wednesday July 10 2019, @02:59PM

    by hendrikboom (1125) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday July 10 2019, @02:59PM (#865392) Homepage Journal

    IBM's execs have a history of initiating layoffs solely to boost share price-- to the point that long-term viability of those areas of the company were severely damaged. There might be a blood bath at the former Redhat. Especially if IBM is only interested in Redhat's cloud business.

    Suppose, just suppose, they were to do that to the systemd gang.