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IBM to acquire Confluent

confluent.io

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Re: IBM to acquire Confluent

#151

Post by DebtDeflation »

rileymichael wrote: post #124

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 h…

And two years prior IBM acquired Ahana (PrestoDB SaaS). Totally agree that businesses need to much more carefully assess the risks of moving to these hosted open source platforms. Reminds me of when over a decade ago companies moved to Snowflake for their DWs because "our Teradata costs are out of control".

Re: IBM to acquire Confluent

#152

Post by Zigurd »

It's like how lots of species evolve into crabs, or crab like things. Instead of dying out evolutionarily, failed giants like IBM evolve into Computer Associates.

Re: IBM to acquire Confluent

#153

Post by calgoo »

trollbridge wrote: post #125
CharlieDigital wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> ...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?

Not OP, they have not tried to sell it to us... yet at least. They are still trying to convince us that MyCloud is a amazing product.

Re: IBM to acquire Confluent

#155

Post by Gilthoniel »

diob wrote: post #133
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…

Yeah, they acquired the company I worked at and left us alone for a year or two. Each year would get worse though, and each year we swapped nearly all bureaucratic things around. Always a different way to do performance reviews goals, etc. A lot of the successful projects at the original company are now dead. It's also weird being in IBM, because if your "contract" ends they put you on the bench. Then you basically h…

I don’t know how many contracts IBM deals with, but the concept of a bench is very common in government contracting. It helps retain talent in an environment that’s more volatile than a typical office. Good for the company to avoid brain drain and hiring overhead, good for the employee because it’s a built-in safety net. Much better than your contract ending and immediately being out of a job, especially in today’s market

Re: IBM to acquire Confluent

#156

Post by sethops1 »

mitchellh wrote: post #72
rmccue wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Source: the guy the company was named after

Re: IBM to acquire Confluent

#157

Post by hazmazlaz »

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.

Judging from what my contacts say, I would not hold my breath. HCP is going to get smashed by bureaucracy and bigcorp bs just like all other IBM acquisitions. All you have to do to verify this is look at linkedin and track the departures of the the acquired staff.

Re: IBM to acquire Confluent

#158

Post by egorfine »

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.

Anything today has to contain the word "AI" otherwise it simply won't be considered.

Re: IBM to acquire Confluent

#159

Post by jerlam »

gedy wrote: post #60
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.

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 in two years, the acquired management team all leaves like clockwork because they got their retention bonus.

Re: IBM to acquire Confluent

#160

Post by everfrustrated »

jen20 wrote: post #100
rmccue wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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,…

> were gearing up to be a more attractive target for an exit An "exit" from the public market?

Yes. They were burning the cash they raised from IPO as weren't profitable and no real path to profitability. Needed to find a buyer to take private as the other option - raise debt or print shares - wasn't going to happen as the share price had massively tanked and wasn't going to go up any time soon.

Hopefully mitchellh will write a book about Hashicorp some time. Would be fascinating to read the inside take.

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