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IBM to acquire Confluent

confluent.io

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Re: IBM to acquire Confluent

#351

Post by PeterCorless »

bonzini wrote: post #336
PeterCorless wrote: post #317

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Thank you for the correction.

Re: IBM to acquire Confluent

#352

Post by agallego »

scirob wrote: post #335
dangoldin wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Hmm. Strange. DM me details. Haven’t heard of anything like that.

Re: IBM to acquire Confluent

#353

Post by jhallenworld »

angled wrote: post #287
jhallenworld wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'll say this about IBM: because it's so old, it was the most diverse company I ever worked for- including age, nationality, race, sex, and any other category you can think of. Basically you had all types of people in all stages of life, not just young white workaholic tech-bros. The founders are long gone, so everyone there (including CEO) is a professional- meaning nobody has any kind of personal attachment to the…

The awe induced when standing in front of a brand new, kitted out x95 frame with all its drawers full and that special shade of IBM blue on everything is definitely something. Pull out the HMC and just think about how many decades of R&D and experience and tears went into the entire system.

I think the driving force behind the look of the recent mainframes is from IBM's Italian designer, Camillo Sassano:

https://www.idsa.org/profile/sassano/

Well there's a whole group, but Camillo is the guy I worked with when I was there.

Re: IBM to acquire Confluent

#354

Post by PeterCorless »

TobiWestside wrote: post #341
PeterCorless wrote: post #314

I have thought quite a bit today about the news from Confluent and IBM. I have friends and colleagues at both companies. When I was an undergrad at Carnegie Mellon University in the 1980s I used to wear a big brown and tan IBM button that said "THINK." And here is a picture of Ben Lorica 罗瑞卡 interviewing Jay Kreps and other industry leaders at The Hive back on the evening of 25 February 2015. I believe they were talk…

A note on your "IBM has been shrinking" take: IBM spun out Kyndryl in 2021, including 90,000 employees [0]. That leaves the remaining company with 255,000 employees after the spin-off in 2021, which means it has actually grown by 15,000 people to reach the 270,000 in 2024. The spin-off also explains the drop in revenue. In 2021, the first results reported excluding Kyndryl, IBM had revenues of $57.4B [1]. Since 2021,…

Fair. A good callout. And maybe the right move. However, a healthy IBM would not have needed to calve off its entire Global Technology Services business.

Re: IBM to acquire Confluent

#355

Post by ericol »

ethbr1 wrote: post #253
ericol wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had no idea about what Watson was initially meant to solve. I do remember they tried to sell it - at least in the meeting I went - as a general purpose chatbot. I did try briefly to understand how to use it, but the documentation was horrendous (As in, "totally devoid of any technical information")

Watson was intended to solve fuzzy optimization problems. Unfortunately, the way it solved fuzzy was 'engineer the problem to fit Watson, then engineer the output to be usable.' Which required every project to be a huge custom implementation lift. Similar to early Palantir.

> Watson was intended to solve fuzzy optimization problems.

> Unfortunately, the way it solved fuzzy was 'engineer the problem to fit Watson, then engineer the output to be usable.'

I'm going to review my understanding of fuzzy optimization because this last line doesn't fit the bill in it.

Re: IBM to acquire Confluent

#356

Post by lucketone »

rwmj wrote: post #52

How is this different from Apache Qpid or RabbitMQ or IBM MQ (at least the first and third of those is already owned by IBM!)

If you use Kafka as a queue, then no difference. (Load balance a message between consumers)

But you can also use Kafka as pub-sub system (duplicate messages to each subscribers)

Messages are not deleted after consumption (configurable)

Re: IBM to acquire Confluent

#357

Post by red-iron-pine »

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

hustle culture bro, everyone needs 996

we are achieving true egalitarianism here, everyone can be a slave regardless of color, creed, or origin

Re: IBM to acquire Confluent

#358

Post by burnte »

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.

Everything in IT is AI now. We should just change the industry initialism to AIT.

Re: IBM to acquire Confluent

#360

Post by ethbr1 »

ericol wrote: post #355
ethbr1 wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Watson was intended to solve fuzzy optimization problems. Unfortunately, the way it solved fuzzy was 'engineer the problem to fit Watson, then engineer the output to be usable.' Which required every project to be a huge custom implementation lift. Similar to early Palantir.

> Watson was intended to solve fuzzy optimization problems. > Unfortunately, the way it solved fuzzy was 'engineer the problem to fit Watson, then engineer the output to be usable.' I'm going to review my understanding of fuzzy optimization because this last line doesn't fit the bill in it.

The reason LLMs are viable for use cases that Watson wasn't is their natural language and universal parsing strengths.

In the Watson era, all the front- and back-ends had to be custom engineered per use case. Read, huge IBM services implementation projects that the company bungled more often than not.

Which is where the Palantir comparison is apt (and differs). Palantir understood their product was the product, and implementation was a necessary evil, to be engineered away ASAP.

To IBM, implementation revenue was the only reason to have a product.

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