Red Hat middleware takes a back seat in strategic shuffle

Red Hat is slowing or stopping development of some of its middleware software, a situation which could result in some staff layoffs. The Register has seen what purports to be an internal email from the IBM subsidiary's vice president of Middleware Engineering, Mark Little, revealing that development and maintenance of several …

[Alistair]

Still sad about this

I was hired on the 8th of October, the announcement came shortly after that. The group I was in for orientation in NC talked about nothing else, including how many of us would survive the takeover. Despite the insistence that nothing would change with IBM taking over, we see where this is going. It is now *all* about ROR.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Still sad about this

The only thing that never changes when IBM takes over is the rapid follow up of people facing redundancy,

[Claverhouse]

Re: Still sad about this

Fortunately for new entrants, their motto appears to be 'First In, First Out'.

[hittitezombie]

Re: Still sad about this

IBM cannot look stuffy and old, over 50? You are history.

[Anonymous Coward]

Elsewhere?

I loved RedHat version 9.0.

I've been on Fedora since FC5.....still on F40.

How long, I wonder, till I need to look elsewhere?

[man_iii]

Re: Elsewhere?

I've already switched out Fedora and CentOS for all openSuse Leap 15.5 seems stable now. YMMV.

[Claverhouse]

The Grand Consultants

McKinsey, like say, the Rand Corporation, appears to be one of those companies, much respected, mysterious to most people, whose recommendations are like little Bonsai Upas Trees.

[Liam Proven]

Re: The Grand Consultants

[Author here]

> Bonsai Upas Trees

I confess I had to look that up.

It's a poisonous tree and one source of arrow poison.

I submit McKinsey is no bonsai: it's a hulking giant that somehow manages to keep itself mostly hidden, possibly by lurking in the dense forest of government procurement, and covered in the creeper vines of bureaucrats and "special advisors" and "management consultants".

[Anonymous Coward]

RHEL Vista?

Sounds like they missed the opportunity to sink money in the Blockchain hype and are doubling down on "everything AI".

A lot of the divested products are workhorses - no longer flashy, or bringing new clients, but used widely enough so that they need updates. I assume that for many of them, the investment is funding 2-5 people to pay attention to vulnerabilities, mailing lists, and integrate pull requests. I also assume that the monthly cost for an OSS developer is less than that of a McK consultant, so they have to make up the difference with higher numbers.

On the plus side, I'm sure the proposal slides looked sleek.

[Groo The Wanderer]

It's IBM. Every decision results in fewer people for the past decade or so...

[David Newall]

Big purple

Snigger

[containerizer]

Most of this is .. actually quite sensible

Don't want to be the "nothing to see here" guy, and layoffs are never good. But some of this actually makes sense.

RH have a long history in maintaining their own builds of things, for example the JDK or Spring, where they add little in the way of extra capability. This made sense back in the days of yonder where community projects tended to be less concerned with LTS builds. RH added value by maintaining such builds.

OSS projects seem, in my perception, to have become much more mature of late, often maintaining their own LTS builds (corporate sponsorship plays its role here). Inevitably, rolling one's own build therefore accomplishes less.

I think it was a couple of years ago that RH announced that the Temurin JDK build would be fully supported on Openshift, for example. There's a win-win thing here; RH backs, and presumably helps fund, a community-led build, so they don't need to have a separate team themselves. The community gets the sponsorship.

[Anonymous Coward]

Looks a bit like the boneheaded management decisions on CentOS a couple of years ago really did kill off RHEL future growth prospects? Or maybe this is completely unrelated...

Oh well, in any case time to cut R&D to the bone and milk the existing customer base for a decade or two in the finest Big Blue tradition

[Reiki Shangle]

William Hill Consulting?

Did they really retain McKinsey & Company, or did they actually bring William Hill on-board?

Personally I don’t rate the odds on the gambles being taken here and elsewhere. Risky strategies based on unverifiable incantations.

Whatever next? The Nostradamus LLM?