A Cold Take on IBM, Red Hat and Their Hybrid Cloud

Re:A Cold Take on IBM, Red Hat and Their Hybrid Cloud by parasubvert on Friday July 19, 2019 @09:12AM (#20478328)

And Red Hat’s stock tanked due to multiple bad quarters as well. What’s your point? It’s hard to be a mid-sized ISV these days unless you also own the hardware or have a massive franchise. Red Hat’s franchise was fading and OpenShift wasn’t growing quick enough to offset it. Meanwhile IBM needed a major strategic shakeup.

Red Hat didn’t report OpenShift revenue, it conflates it with JBoss, Ansible, and all other middleware products.

I have no doubt there are more paying OpenShift customers in quantity, but I wonder about revenues - Cloud Foundry always was larger than OpenShift, and if OpenShift surpassed it, that would be indeed news. Cloud Foundry is easily a $500m software business at Pivotal alone, not counting services.

It’s all peanuts in the grand scheme of the industry so far - which is the point of this post. What does $38 billion actually buy IBM? A bunch of $150k-500k annual revenue customers? chairs on a bunch of Kubernetes SIGs? VMware got that with Heptio for $500m. Mostly it’s the K8s and Linux brain trust , and maybe Whitehurst as a new CEO in waiting, but that’s a hell of a price for an aquihire.

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Re:A Cold Take on IBM, Red Hat and Their Hybrid Cloud by fatherlinnux on Tuesday July 23, 2019 @01:51PM (#20508694)

Small correction, it's ALWAYS been hard to be a mid-sized software company. We were constantly talking about the 5 or so companies that reached 5B with software only. They are rare birds indeed. Red Hat didn't make it without getting bought... (full disclosure, I work at Red Hat)

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