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IBM to acquire Confluent

confluent.io

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Re: IBM to acquire Confluent

#121

Post by godzillabrennus »

wetwater wrote: post #105
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…

In defense of Byzantines. Their rules and amazing diplomatic prowess is what let them be an empire for so long. The negative connotations to Byzantine comes from the negative perception the west had of them. Byzantines were very practical in regards to who they allied with.

I'm sure the children who watched their parents get murdered before they themselves were taken into slavery during the fall of Constantinople appreciated those rules and the alliances they supported.

Re: IBM to acquire Confluent

#122

Post by fatal94 »

devnull3 wrote: post #88
fatal94 wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I think there is a wide spectrum between small-homelab and google scale. I was surprised how far sqlite goes with some sharding on modern SSDs for those in-between scale services/saas

What you're doing is fine for a homelab, or learning. But barring any very specific reason other than just not liking Kafka, its bad. The second that pattern needs to be fanned out to support even 50+ producers/consumers, the overhead and complexity needed to manage already-solved problems becomes a very bad design choice.

Kafka already solves this problem and gives me message durability, near infinite scale out, sharding, delivery guarantees, etc out of the box. I do not care to develop, reshard databases or production-alize this myself.

Re: IBM to acquire Confluent

#123

Post by AdmiralAsshat »

cr125rider wrote: post #53
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 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.

They said the same thing about Red Hat. The fact that Whitehurst resigned from IBM should tell you something.

Re: IBM to acquire Confluent

#124

Post by rileymichael »

ibm also acquired datastax (managed pulsar) this year. building on top of these specialized managed service providers is becoming increasingly risky. at this point i'd rather use one of the kneecapped cloud provider offerings if possible (azure event hubs / aws msk / etc.) than risk being extorted in a few years as the result of some acquisition. at least you can work around the limitations..

anyone have an idea on how streamnative is doing? we're considering them for managed pulsar and unfortunately nobody else is in the game

Re: IBM to acquire Confluent

#125

Post by trollbridge »

CharlieDigital wrote: post #91
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…

> ...and internal systems they have to use, whose sole purpose is to make sure nobody does anything I once had to use Lotus Notes after the company I was at was acquired by the now defunct Computer Sciences Corporation. I decided I would never, ever work for another company that used Lotus Notes.

Hasn't Notes been sluffed off to HCL?

Re: IBM to acquire Confluent

#126

Post by Oras »

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.

AI Agent for Kafka Consumer group

/s

Re: IBM to acquire Confluent

#127

Post by bityard »

this_user wrote: post #32
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.

The argument has been made that the real value of RH lies in the people working there. And if IBM were to interfere too heavy-handedly, those people would just leave, and RH would become basically worthless.

Maybe that's how it should work, but it's not how it actually works.

The culture makes the company. Everyone on the lower rungs of the org chart knows this, because it's what they live and breathe every day. A positive, supportive workplace culture with clear goals and relative autonomy is a thing of beauty. You routinely find people doing more work than they really have to because they believe in the mission, or their peers, or the work is just fun. People join the company (and stay) because they WANT to not because they have to.

Past a certain company size, upper management NEVER sees this. They are always looking outward: strategy, customers, marketing, competition. Never in. They've been trained to give great motivational speeches that instill a sense of company pride and motivation for about 30 seconds. After that, employee morale is HR's job.

I have worked in a company that got acquired while it was profitable. The culture change was slow but dramatic. We went from a fun, dynamic culture with lots of teamwork and supportive management, to one step or two above Office Space. As far as the acquiring company was concerned, everything we were doing didn't matter, even if it worked. We had to conform to their systems and processes, or find new jobs. Most of us eventually did the latter.

Somehow Red Hat seems to be a notable exception. Although IBM owns Red Hat, they seem to have mostly left it alone instead of absorbing it. The name "IBM" doesn't even appear on redhat.com. Because I'm an outsider, I can't say whether IBM meddled in Red Hat's HR or management, but I would guess not.

Re: IBM to acquire Confluent

#128

Post by blcknight »

AdmiralAsshat wrote: post #123
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.

They said the same thing about Red Hat. The fact that Whitehurst resigned from IBM should tell you something.

I'm pretty sure Jim had aspirations of being IBM CEO but they picked Arvind instead.

Re: IBM to acquire Confluent

#130

Post by dangoldin »

b33f wrote: post #15

Maybe a good time to consider alternatives https://www.redpanda.com/compare/redpanda-vs-kafka

I led the engineering team of a large adtech company (TripleLift - order of hundreds of billions of events/day) and we evolved from self hosting Kafka, to paying a vendor (Instacluster), to migrating to RedPanda.

RedPanda was a huge win for us. Confluent never made sense to us since we were always so cost conscious but the complexity/risk of managing a critical part of our infra was always something I worried about. RedPanda was able to handle both for us - cheaper than Kafka hosting vendors with significantly better performance. We were pretty early customers but was a huge win for us.

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