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from the partly-sunny-with-hybrid-clouds dept.
No Culture Clash in the Marriage of IBM and Red Hat
How is the marriage between IBM and Red Hat going?
The view from the executive boardroom is good. IBM was recently able to report an uptick in income after five quarters of falling revenues, partly because of income produced by its new red-headed open source partner.
[ . . . . ] Further evidence that the suits at the top are happy came with the recent announcement that next month when Ginni Rometty steps down as IBM's president and CEO Jim Whitehurst will be taking a seat at the big kids' table as IBM's president while remaining as Red Hat's CEO.
From the start, IBM said it would leave Red Hat alone and that the new buy would operate as an independent company. [ . . . . ] "I don't have a $34 billion death wish," Rometty added. "I didn't buy them to destroy them."
[ . . . . ] "but IBM has also been a huge proponent of open source. [IBM] obviously has both open and proprietary-based solutions, but they've been a big sponsor of Linux and the Linux Foundation, and they've been involved in communities like Kubernetes. I think IBM doesn't get enough credit sometimes for what they've done for open source." [ . . . . ] it's doubtful Linux would be the dominant force in data centers it has become if it were not for IBM's $1 billion investment in the operating system's development in 2001. It's also true that over the years IBM has been a contributor to important open source projects [ . . . ]
[ . . . . ] It was Red Hat's cloud expertise that first prompted IBM to consider its $34 billion investment in Red Hat. According to IBM, many of its enterprise customers have yet to utilize public clouds and are reluctant to give up their own on-premises data centers, often because they're still dependent on large monolithic applications that weren't designed for cloud-native infrastructures. Others are in highly regulated businesses with requirements to keep customer data on-prem.
IBM has been advocating hybrid cloud as a way for companies to keep much of their compute on-prem while harnessing the advantages offered by public clouds for some workloads. As it happens, Red Hat practically wrote the book on hybrid cloud, and is responsible for much of the technology – like OpenStack and OpenShift – that makes it possible.
"Hybrid cloud is something that Red Hat's been a strong proponent of," said Fernandes.
How important is Red Hat perceived to be for non data center applications?
(Score: 4, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 24 2020, @10:26PM (1 child)
The only thing worse than systemd is coronavirus. Barely.
(Score: 5, Touché) by barbara hudson on Tuesday March 24 2020, @11:11PM
Most people will recover from coronavirus.
SoylentNews is social media. Says so right in the slogan. Soylentnews is people, not tech.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 24 2020, @10:53PM
About 20 or so years ago they had a web area developerWorks that had a ton of great linux and open source information. That was really really helpful for me. For instance, a lot of great tutorials and articles by Daniel Robbins. I learned a lot of great stuff on bash programming, python, etc. I haven't been to the web site in over 15 years, so I hope it is as useful now as it was back in late 1999/early 2000.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 24 2020, @10:54PM (2 children)
I've worked at IBM. Their software is trash their services are trash. Their cloud infrastructure loses money every quarter. When I was on call (not in my job description, but they didn't care) doing support for the IBM container cloud, the typical resolution to any incident was to run "killall minerd" because invariably the account had been hacked and was mining bitcoin.
IBM makes its money selling support. Nobody can figure out how to use their junk. The only way to configure it is with IBM help.
Does that sound familiar?
I think IBM and systemd go perfectly together.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 25 2020, @12:21AM (1 child)
So IBM is doing good at this point? Don't tell this guy, https://www.audible.com/pd/The-Decline-and-Fall-of-IBM-Audiobook/B00O7Z653K [audible.com]
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 25 2020, @12:38AM
Periodic layoffs are indicative of a healthy company.
(Score: 2) by Bot on Tuesday March 24 2020, @10:58PM
evil ones getting along at light speed. The same speed may be used to backstab your former ally, of course.
Account abandoned.
(Score: 2) by Snotnose on Wednesday March 25 2020, @12:34AM (2 children)
Buys a company run by young folks. Wonder how long this bump will last?
When the dust settled America realized it was saved by a porn star.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 25 2020, @01:26AM (1 child)
Why do you think RedHat is run by young folks? They were founded 27 years ago. They are no upstart.
(Score: 2) by fido_dogstoyevsky on Wednesday March 25 2020, @10:41PM
So they'd be in their 50s? They're young.
It's NOT a conspiracy... it's a plot.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 25 2020, @01:24AM (4 children)
Wasn't the disastrously overcomplicated, underperforming Java Enterprise Beans model from back in the day IBM's invention that they got Sun to adopt?
The idea behind that was to break up the app into many little functional areas, each of which would be managed by a poorly paid, know-little, outsourced engineer.
That almost killed Java.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 25 2020, @01:55PM (3 children)
I hate EJBs, but to be fair the core problem that caused them was Java itself, not IBM. Java before version 8 has to be one of the most verbose programming languages ever invented, right up there with COBOL. GNU grep is 120k lines of C, if it was written in Java 1.3 it would be 0.85e22 lines of code. If you took Java 1.3 and had to replace an EJB implementation, your replacement would only be marginally shorter and less awful to work on.
Java 8 added lambdas, streams, and default interface method implementations. Since then Java has added multiline string support, factory methods for immutable collection types, better forms of case statements, and limited type inference. Maybe by 2030 it will be as pleasant to use as Kotlin, Groovy, or Scala.
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Wednesday March 25 2020, @04:24PM
I've never used EJBs.
By 2030, I hope Kotlin, Groovy and Scala will still be around.
The lower I set my standards the more accomplishments I have.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 25 2020, @05:11PM (1 child)
Disagree. Spring was invented as a much simpler alternative to EJBs many, many years before all your pet language features were added to Java. Spring killed EJB and became the new standard. Spring saved Java.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 26 2020, @02:11AM
I worked with a Spring application once and I was always surprised why every operation was done with a crazy deep stack. A multi-step login kept on descending further and further with each step until everything was unwound in the end, as opposed to making new state available to a higher position in the stack.