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IBM to acquire Confluent

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Re: IBM to acquire Confluent

#111

Post by Romario77 »

spyspy wrote: post #44
zkmon wrote: post #8

Kafka is already past it's prime time. Time for new solutions for the oldest problem - sending a message.

I'm still convinced the vast majority of kafka implementations could be replaced with `SELECT * FROM mytable ORDER BY timestamp ASC`

pull vs push. Plus if you start storing the last timestamp so you only select the delta and if you start sharding your db and dealing with complexities of having different time on different tables/replication issues it quickly becomes evident that Kafka is better in this regard.

But yeah, for a lot of implementations you don't need streaming. But for pull based apps you design your architecture differently, some things are a lot easier than it is with DB, some things are harder.

Re: IBM to acquire Confluent

#112

Post by jamespo »

EarthIsHome wrote: post #18
hadrien01 wrote: post #11

Genuine 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.

Gnome has stagnated significantly.

Linux on the desktop isn't a lucrative business

Re: IBM to acquire Confluent

#113

Post by apgwoz »

sausagefeet wrote: post #107
cr125rider wrote: post #53

Earlier 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.

HCP wasn't any prize when they got bought, though, right? HashiCorp Cloud was more like a fog in terms of growth. A bunch of products got lost a long the way (Boundary? Waypoint?) HCP lost 50% of its IPO value by the time it was bought. Yes, I know IPO's are high and always go down, but it went from around a $14bn valuation to being bought for something like $6.5bn.

Not to mention HashiCorp bled talent before the acquisition was even announced (BUSL started it) and it didn’t really stop as far as I’m aware.

Re: IBM to acquire Confluent

#114

Post by raverbashing »

fatal94 wrote: post #83
spyspy wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm still convinced the vast majority of kafka implementations could be replaced with `SELECT * FROM mytable ORDER BY timestamp ASC`

Sure, if you're working on a small homelab with minimal to no processing volume. The second you approach any kind of scale, this falls apart and/or you end up with a more expensive and worse version of Kafka.

"Any kind of scale" No, there's a long way of better and more straightforward solutions than the simple SELECT

(SELECT * from EVENTS where TIMESTAMP > LAST_TS LIMIT 50) for example

Re: IBM to acquire Confluent

#115

Post by CyanLite2 »

belter wrote: post #102

This is so funny. Now CNBC says "...The addition of Confluence will strengthen IBM’s artificial intelligence portfolio..." Since when is streaming event logs AI? Am I taking crazy pills?

Near-Real-time inference is a hot thing these days with Apache Flink, which is commercially supported by Confluent (not Confluence)

Re: IBM to acquire Confluent

#116

Post by kitd »

jhickok wrote: post #101
kitd wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Event-driven AI decision making is the C-suite wet dream. A large % of major orgs run Kafka for their eventing systems.

So the idea is sorta watching the wire of streaming data with autonomous agents or something like that?

Exactly. An agent may be acting on the contents of individual events, but also spotting trends and patterns in events, and intervening where needed/instructed.

Re: IBM to acquire Confluent

#117

Post by paxys »

ericol wrote: post #89
notepad0x90 wrote: post #28

This 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…

> Ok, so does anyone remember 'Watson'? It was the chatgpt before chatgpt. they built it in house I do. I remember going to a chat once where they wanted to get people on-board in using it. It was 90 minutes of hot air. They "showed" how Watson worked and how to implement things, and I think every single person in the room knew they were full of it. Imagine we were all engineers and there were no questions at the end…

Watson was nothing like ChatGPT. The first iteration was a system specifically built to play Jeopardy. It did some neat stuff with NLP and information retrieval, but it was all still last generation AI/ML technology. It then evolved into a brand that IBM used to sell its consulting services. The product itself was a massive failure because it had no real applications and was too weak as a general purpose chat bot.

Re: IBM to acquire Confluent

#118

Post by scarmig »

jhickok wrote: post #9

“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.

You can double your company's value by saying it's an AI company. Easiest, simplest way to create value.

Re: IBM to acquire Confluent

#119

Post by godzillabrennus »

JSR_FDED wrote: post #30

IBM have an absolutely stellar record of blowing acquisitions. The highly motivated newly acquired team will be in honeymoon phase for 3 months, and then it slowly dawns on them that they’ve joined an unbelievably rigid organization where things like customer satisfaction and great products don’t matter at all. Then they’ll be in shock and disbelief at the mind boggling Byzantine rules and internal systems they have…

I've heard IBM is really just an external government agency. If you look at it through the lens of being acquired by a government bureaucracy, then your explanation makes perfect sense. IBM is too entrenched to fail and too poorly run to be acquired.

Re: IBM to acquire Confluent

#120

Post by CyanLite2 »

paxys wrote: post #21
jituyadav wrote: post #2

is it good or bad for confluent employees?

IBM paid a ~30% premium on the current stock price, so all shareholders (I imagine employees own a bunch of shares) will get a decent chunk of cash. Some redundant departments (HR, finance, accounting and the like) will be downsized after the acquisition. Engineering and product will be unaffected in the short term, but in a year or two the IBM culture will start to seep in, and that would be a good time for tenured…

And sales teams will likely be forced to cross-sell IBM Products.
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