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IBM Closes Acquisition of Red Hat for $34B

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Re: IBM Closes Acquisition of Red Hat for $34B

#201

Post by adamredwoods »

tontonius wrote: post #84

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. At the moment, IBM is trading down at -0.5% on an ot…

Debt is reduced when inflation goes up. Perhaps they are predicting inflation?

Re: IBM Closes Acquisition of Red Hat for $34B

#202

Post by checktheorder »

jaboutboul wrote: post #26
jake_morrison wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Probably Ubuntu will be bought by Microsoft. With the cloud, especially containers, there is little future in a business that involves paying for operating systems licenses. Most interesting is probably supporting legacy versions of operating systems for customers who value compatibility to be able to continue to run existing applications with the minimum changes.

I sort of agree with this. Either Microsoft will purchase Ubuntu outright from Shuttleworth or they will just create Microsoft Linux, in whatever form that is, probably something more container focused than a general purpose OS.

I've sometimes found myself wondering what kernel is actually running Microsoft's new "Modern OS", and if the userspace has any Ubuntu input.

Re: IBM Closes Acquisition of Red Hat for $34B

#203

Post by babarock »

DocTomoe wrote: post #61
bmicklea wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Red Hat's commitments to the open source projects it works on from linux, to kubernetes, to java, and many others will remain unchanged.

Without a timeframe, that statement is worthless. And that timeframe might be shorter than you'd think. My guess would be "days".

> And that timeframe might be shorter than you'd think. My guess would be "days".

Any evidence to back up your guess, or is it just the hunch of some dude on the internet?

Re: IBM Closes Acquisition of Red Hat for $34B

#204

Post by pepemon »

stirfrykitty wrote: post #163
jvagner wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the move towards FreeBSD Who? Where? for what? You mentioned BeOS. Sorry, I love nostalgia too, but I have no idea what you're talking about. Out in AWS, GCP, Azure, DO -land... it's still going to be Ubuntu, Debian, CentOS, Windows, etc for a long time.

It's all in what people are willing to tolerate or change. Obviously, the gentlemen over at Haiku feel they have something to offer, as small as it may be. I always though that BeOS was somewhat revolutionary in its approach. I'm still somewhat bothered that Apple let their server offering go. And yes, FreeBSD replaces Linux easily. Not everyone runs their stuff in the cloud. It's not the be-all and end-all. Serious…

Please elaborate on "more and more IT guys I know move over to Free/OpenBSD" and your mentioned easiness of migration.

Re: IBM Closes Acquisition of Red Hat for $34B

#205

Post by bluGill »

m45t3r wrote: post #195
stirfrykitty wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's all in what people are willing to tolerate or change. Obviously, the gentlemen over at Haiku feel they have something to offer, as small as it may be. I always though that BeOS was somewhat revolutionary in its approach. I'm still somewhat bothered that Apple let their server offering go. And yes, FreeBSD replaces Linux easily. Not everyone runs their stuff in the cloud. It's not the be-all and end-all. Serious…

> And yes, FreeBSD replaces Linux easily. No, it doesn’t. Take any non trivial system running Linux and try to run it in FreeBSD. You may get it running in little time, however the number of issues you would have would be big. Remember that the modern stack have multiple layers of complexity, Linux, your app, SomethingSQL, AnotherThingDb, Kubernetes, AWS/GCE/Azure, etc. Since FreeBSD is not the common choice to run t…

Depends on the system. For a desktop enviornment you are correct, *bsd is at best an after thought to pretty much all projects. However "serious" server programs tend to get much more testing on BSD. I don't think you will have any issues running a database on BSD, and probably not a web server (though some web frameworks are Linux first so YMMV)

Re: IBM Closes Acquisition of Red Hat for $34B

#206

Post by aksss »

jedimastert wrote: post #137
iNate2000 wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Like, existing deals, you mean?

Yeah, like if there's a contract between them or a regular amount of spending, that's an amount of money that IBM's saving each year, but that's also money that RedHat won't be earning each year. I don't know how important, percentage-wise, that number would be for either side. I imagine any amount of money would be a far bigger deal for RedHat than IBM.

Well, it's a bit like renting an apartment vs paying down a mortgage, right? On the books they (IBM) will almost certainly still be paying the subsidiary (RH), and the subsidiary will still record and report the revenue. But IBM is now building equity with its payments up at the consolidated reporting level rather than shoveling the cash out the window.

Re: IBM Closes Acquisition of Red Hat for $34B

#207

Post by NikolaNovak »

asdf21 wrote: post #94
duxup wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IBM has been stumbling around trying to find its feet again for a while now. It seems possible that despite the advantages you cite that IBM won't know how to use them. Word from the inside is that IBM's own "sales machine" selling Watson for what it really wasn't ... was a great deal of the problem with Watson. The skepticism about IBM is rooted in their recent history.

Yeah, whatever happened to Watson? I haven't really heard much in a couple years now..

Disclosure: I'm an IBM employee working on legacy enterprise architecture absolutely nowhere near Watson. If modern stuff is on the left side of spectrum (AI/ML, CI/CD, Javascript and web frameworks etc), I'm somewhere at the edge of solar system on the right side of the spectrum :)

That being said, my personal impression from the market, and completely unauthoritative, is that Watson is a brand-name, NOT a single product; it's a collection of products, some built, some purchased, some integrated, some stand-alone, some simple, some complex, under the AI/ML/"Cognitive" umbrella. Most companies have branding/pillars - in IBM, Infosphere used to be information management, Lotus was collaboration and communication, Rational for project management / testing / modelling / etc, and so on. So you have "Watson Predictive Analyzer" and "Watson Chat Service API" and "Watson AI Doodad #37", etc where you can seamlessly take out Watson, replace it with IBM or not at all. There is no single Watson product that I'm aware of. Some stuff was likely even re-branded from previous analytics/BI into Watson branding as deemed appropriate.

Globally-intentionally or not (opinions differ wildly), market perceived "Watson" as "that big machine that won Jeopardy" - a single drop-in product, as opposed a suite of independent products that can certainly do many things, but need hard work at data cleansing, formatting, modelling, testing, etc to do useful things.

I mean, cognitive/watson/AI implementation projects seem to be order of magnitude faster than my experience with Enterprise Architecture projects; but still not a "plug in box, push button".

My $0.01CAD :)

Re: IBM Closes Acquisition of Red Hat for $34B

#208

Post by aksss »

coliveira wrote: post #107
tontonius wrote: post #84

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. At the moment, IBM is trading down at -0.5% on an ot…

But IBM bought RH only because they believed that the company has growth ahead. If it grows a little more than 1% a year (which should be easy) that will be enough to break even. I think that was a smart move by IBM.

I remember someone pretty savvy once rhetorically asking why companies are always doing M&A's that seem questionable from ground level. She said because it's more fun to buy things than doing the real work of cleaning up your own company model and performance. There's some sobering truth to that explanation of corporate behavior. The illusion of growth and progress and the thrill of the acquisition can be a good short-term anesthetic. I tend to think IBM is a bit more deliberate than that, however.

Re: IBM Closes Acquisition of Red Hat for $34B

#209

Post by babarock »

throw0101a wrote: post #197
Conan_Kudo wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> and then not having a way to send logs remotely, so you have to run rsyslog anyway. journald has its own remote gateway and can ship logs elsewhere. It's not on by default, but you can easily configure it. There are several addons for plugging in specific protocols and services into the journal.

Are you referring to systemd-journal-remote ? * https://www.freedesktop.org/software/systemd/man/systemd-jou... I am referring to something syslog -based: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syslog#Internet_standard_docum... which can be used by other tools to process. Can you point me to documentation on how journald can be configured to send to a remote syslog server?

https://www.freedesktop.org/software/systemd/man/journald.co...

Seriously, it's in the man page.

Re: IBM Closes Acquisition of Red Hat for $34B

#210

Post by rleigh »

jvagner wrote: post #152
stirfrykitty wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a lot of truth to this. Since Fedora is the upstream for Red Hat, and IBM historically kill off anything not making a profit, how long before this happens? I wonder if they'll split the two? Red Hat does "control" a disproportionate amount of Linux development. Everything is also now basically dependent on systemd. I'm seeing more and more IT guys I know move over to Free/OpenBSD because they don't like the…

> the move towards FreeBSD Who? Where? for what? You mentioned BeOS. Sorry, I love nostalgia too, but I have no idea what you're talking about. Out in AWS, GCP, Azure, DO -land... it's still going to be Ubuntu, Debian, CentOS, Windows, etc for a long time.

FreeBSD just got some big updates to improve performance on multi-core virtualised systems. I'm looking forward to testing them.

Yes, you're right, Ubuntu, Debian, CentOS etc. are the common systems in use for this purpose today. But, if you needed to, you could absolutely use FreeBSD as an alternative. And should there be pressure to drop any of these Linux systems for any reason, having alternatives right there you can switch to is very useful. As is avoiding vendor locking and ensuring there's meaningful competition.

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