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posted by Fnord666 on Tuesday March 24 2020, @09:33PM   Printer-friendly
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?


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  • (Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 25 2020, @12:38AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 25 2020, @12:38AM (#975270)

    Periodic layoffs are indicative of a healthy company.

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