At least you can now safely buy into Kafka, as nobody ever got fired for buying IBM.
This isn't the old times, you can expect the opposite outcome these days.
OP IMHO was obviously being sarcastic.
IBM to acquire Confluent
71–80 of 374 posts
Re: IBM to acquire Confluent
#72Genuine 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.
We moved off HashiCorp's Terraform Cloud when they tried to hike the price 100x on us, although that was technically pre-acquisition I think (it was their move to resource-based pricing). In talking with our account manager, they basically said they only really cared about enterprise accounts, and that migrating away would probably make sense for us. HashiCorp also changed their licenses to non-open-source licenses,…
> (I think as they were gearing up to be a more attractive target for an exit).
A common conspiracy theory, but not true.
Re: IBM to acquire Confluent
#73This 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…
There are entire niches of us that make a living (not at IBM) making certain IBM products actually do what they're supposed to. From my vantage point I see essentially zero maintenance going on with their products. I sincerely don't understand the market (why do people keep paying hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars for non-existent support?) - but whatever.
Re: IBM to acquire Confluent
#74Genuine 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.
I migrated our company off Terraform to Pulumi as a direct result of the acquisition.
Re: IBM to acquire Confluent
#75good for the founding team! Kafka is an enterprise bloat. most of the queueing solutions could be built with something much simpler
Re: IBM to acquire Confluent
#76“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... I don't understand how this acquisition is relevant for AI.
They probably have cursor licenses
Re: IBM to acquire Confluent
#77This 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…
To add to that i think their R&D labs along with HPE were one of the few to innovate on the memristor and actually build some fascinating concept machines.If i rememeber HPE's was 'The Machine'.
Athough i think they just di/dont know how to adapt these to market that isnt a enterprise behemoth , rather than develop/price it so more devs can take a hold and experiment.
Re: IBM to acquire Confluent
#78Maybe a good time to consider alternatives https://www.redpanda.com/compare/redpanda-vs-kafka
We 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.
Re: IBM to acquire Confluent
#79Kafka is already past it's prime time. Time for new solutions for the oldest problem - sending a message.
Nothing wrong with Kafka. Time to build better abstractions on top of Kafka.
Re: IBM to acquire Confluent
#80Earlier quoted context omitted.
I hope Hashicorp survives. A few higher ups I’ve talked to there made it seem like IBM wants to learn from them, not force their old ways onto Hashicorp. We’ll see. That one is still pretty new.
Not to be cynical but that's said a lot in acquisitions by bigger companies to motivate some people to stay, but just doesn't seem to happen.
And even if there is a 20% of executives actually believe in "We should learn from HashiCorp", usually not even that is enough to counter-act the default mode of operation which is squeezing customers. GLHF to remaining HashiCorp believers, but personally I'd try to find alternatives for the software you use from them if you haven't already.