Reply to post: Re: Redhat employees - get out now

Official: IBM to gobble Red Hat for $34bn – yes, the enterprise Linux biz

Anonymous Coward
Anonymous Coward

Re: Redhat employees - get out now

"Not necessarily, if they play it right they could take over IBM from the inside - the board and bean counters would only find out when they were thrown out."

You're looking at IBM as a technology company that will benefit from being run by people that understand technology.

IBM is a financial company that makes money from financing expensive legacy systems and service contracts. Software and hardware are just the bait on the hook.

So the question is why would IBM pay so much? Red Hat appears to be reasonably healthy (growing in all reported areas at around 10%-15%/year) but was valued around the $20B mark that appeared to be a fair assessment given there's no large pile of cash or other obvious value to unlock.

My suspicion is that IBM plan to hit all the third parties using Red Hat on their appliances with big subscription rises to squeeze out money in the short-to-mid term. I could be wrong but I think the majority of customers would look to move off Red Hat (we're already consolidating environments and pushing non-essential stuff to after the last Red Hat increases gave us a ~30% rise which resulted in a six figure subscription increases).

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