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IBM to acquire Confluent

confluent.io

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Re: IBM to acquire Confluent

#331

Post by biztos »

npalli wrote: post #272

Confluent was trading at less than 50% of its IPO price when IBM made the offer. The stock and the company has been going sideways for several years now, keeps growing revenues but loses even more as most of it is in Sales and Marketing. In which world is this seen as some sort of extraordinary company that will get sabotaged by IBM. Seems Confluent management knows the writing on the wall, IBM will clean up (fire a…

Are they really a software business?

Investopedia says[0] they make 60% of their profit from "Software" but how much of that is "providing cloud solutions" and similar software-adjacent consulting exercises?

[0]: https://www.investopedia.com/how-ibm-makes-money-4798528

Re: IBM to acquire Confluent

#332

Post by raesene9 »

newsoftheday wrote: post #208
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.

A lot of people seem to voice a disdain for Notes but I actually liked it for some reason.

In a lot of ways Notes was ahead of its time. You could easily have encrypted replicated databases with offline work, which was very handy for traveling users back before high bandwidth connections were widely available, and you could build quite complex apps on top of those databases.

I saw at least one large company that migrated from Notes to exchange and they got the email/calendaring bit done quite easily and were still running notes servers for line of business applications years later.

Re: IBM to acquire Confluent

#334

Post by g-clef »

ojosilva wrote: post #323
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…

Just the set the record straight on how and why these acquisitions go at IBM. This is a first hand account working at and with IBM and competitors and being in the room as tech-guy accessory to murder. IBM lives off huge multi-year contract deals with their customers, each are multi-multi-million dollars worth. IBM has many of these contracts, maybe ~2000 of them around the planet, including your own government where…

having worked in a government agency that ditched IBM, let me offer a view of what that looks like from the customer side:

IBM bought a company whose product we'd been using for a while, and had a perpetual license for. A few years after the purchase, IBM tried to slip a clause into a support renewal that said we were "voluntarily" agreeing to revoke the perpetual license and move to a yearly per-seat license. Note: this was in a contract with the government, for support, not for the product itself. They then tried to come after us for seat licenses costs. Our lawyers ripped them apart, as you can't add clauses about licensing for software to a services contract, and we immediately tore out the product and never paid IBM another dime.

I tell this story not to be all "cool story, bro", but to point out that IBM does focus on renewal growth, but they're not geniuses...they're just greedy assholes who sometimes push for growth in really stupid ways.

Re: IBM to acquire Confluent

#335

Post by scirob »

dangoldin wrote: post #130
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.…

Last i talked to RedPanda sales while working at a big name client they would not offer us anything below $100k per year for enterprise support etc (us running on our kubernetes). Looks like they added some "serverless" pricing thing now, but at the time Azure Eventhub (kakfa client compatible) was cheapest enterprisy option if I remember correctly.

Re: IBM to acquire Confluent

#336

Post by bonzini »

PeterCorless wrote: post #317
bityard wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 the…

There have been annual layoffs at RedHat since 2023. This year they just laid off more. The layoffs this year are expected to be "a low single digit percentage of our global workforce." Which will likely include hundreds of folks at Red Hat. 1. https://www.cio.com/article/4084855/ibm-to-cut-thousands-of-... 2. https://www.newsobserver.com/news/business/article312796900....

There haven't been layoffs at Red Hat after 2023, whereas according to your statement there should have been two more rounds. The layoffs from your articles are at IBM, and did not affect Red Hat.

Re: IBM to acquire Confluent

#337

Post by sbarre »

beachy wrote: post #313
ChuckMcM wrote: post #304

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No. They are a multi-generational institution at this point and they are constantly evolving. If you work there it definitely FEELS like they are dying because the thing you spent the last 10 years of your career on is going away and was once heralded as the "next big thing." That said, IBM fascinated me when I was acquired by them because it is like a living organism. Hard to kill, fully enmeshed in both the busines…

That's an interesting and enlightening way to look at it. For me it was the death of IBM's preeminence in IT. When I started there a job at IBM was prestigious,a job for life. More than once I was told that we had a lengthy backlog of inventions and technological wonders that could be wheeled out of the plant if competitors ever nipped too closely at IBM's heels. At that time IBM had never made a single person redund…

To be fair, the whole job market has changed. Layoffs and the death of "a job for life" is not unique to IBM.

I think the pace of progress and innovation has, for better or worse, meant that companies can no longer count on successfully evolving only from the inside through re-training and promotions over the average employee's entire career arc (let's say 30 years).

The reality is that too many people who seek out jobs in huge companies like IBM are not looking to constantly re-invent themselves and learn new things and keep pushing themselves into new areas every 5-10 years (or less), which is table stakes now for tech companies that want to stay relevant.

Re: IBM to acquire Confluent

#338

Post by namdnay »

beachy wrote: post #290
npalli wrote: post #272

Confluent was trading at less than 50% of its IPO price when IBM made the offer. The stock and the company has been going sideways for several years now, keeps growing revenues but loses even more as most of it is in Sales and Marketing. In which world is this seen as some sort of extraordinary company that will get sabotaged by IBM. Seems Confluent management knows the writing on the wall, IBM will clean up (fire a…

I joined IBM over 40 years ago, like my pappy before me. My main takeaway from IBM's longevity is just how astonishingly long big companys' death rattles can be, not how great IBM are at running software businesses.

I don't think they're dying at all, they're just become yet another consultancy/outsourcing shop

Re: IBM to acquire Confluent

#339

Post by mliezun »

jerrinot wrote: post #40
mliezun wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe this whole thing it's because Snowflake acquired redpanda earlier this year: https://www.investors.com/news/technology/snowflake-stock-re...

Snowflake did not acquire RP after all.

Oh wow, my bad. Thanks for setting the record straight.

Re: IBM to acquire Confluent

#340

Post by swader999 »

parpfish wrote: post #259
Lammy wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And they work at leisure pace for tech. Actual 9 to 5, many coffee breaks. Ultra-based. We should all be so lucky.

You mean you DONT work a leisurely 6-8 hour day with breaks? I thought everybody did that until there was some urgent firefighting

I sure do, if I'm at my computer longer the work quality goes way down. I'm thinking about it much longer each day than working on it.
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