Eine Menge Geld für einen roten Hut: 33 Milliarden Dollar zahlt IBM für die Erweiterung ihrer Cloud -Services um den Anbieter Red Hat aus dem Linux-Lager. Wenn man dazu die Lesermeinung im
Wall Street Journal liest, ist man entsetzt darüber, wie tief dieses einstmals so stolze Unternehmen gefallen ist. Hier mal ein paar Auszüge.
Death Spiral... Just watch
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This company kills everything it acquires and it paid way too much, the
Sears of computing.. It's legacy business will die a slow death, stalled
by legacy companies that also will die because they can't won't change
themselves. Just look how many places still run Cobol.
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This is bad news for Red Hat. Everything IBM touches turns blue and
dies. I laugh everytime I see a commercial for Watson. How can a company
advertise their prowess at prediction then miss their numbers so
consistently? Hilarious. Sad but hilarious.
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With all its intellectual prowess, IBM had to go outside to find a
business that could help it grow. That says it all. Rommetty was the
beginning of the end. Unless they can find another McKinsey guy to
straighten out the business and focus on results instead of social
engineering, they're finished. Shame. I worked there in the 70s and it
was a truly great company.
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IBM is trying to pump up their stagnant revenue after years of failures
and poor performance with maybe the worst tech CEO ever. As the whole
thing crumbles perhaps someone like HP or a Chinese company will buy the
scraps
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IBM has $125 billion in assets on its books, but its net equity is only
$17.5 billion. The killer is that $40 billion of those assets are
goodwill and intangibles. Even before the Red Hat transaction, there's
no "There" there. Now they are going to borrow some more money to buy
Red Hat at 11 times gross revenues? Ironic they should choose Halloween
week to announce this, because they strike me as a zombie company.
Their balance sheet is an empty shell, and this transaction makes them
look like a dead man walking. It's like Singer Sewing Machines going
into the Computer business. I'll bet the best of Red Hat will scramble
for the exits the first chance they get.
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The only big branded growing big cloud services company willing to sell
to IBM. IBM gets one big deal like this, and the next one is a
merger.
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Maybe ask Watson if this is a good idea! Talk about grabbing at straws!
3 years ago Red Hat could have been purchased for next to nothing
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IBM und Mainframes - eine Diskussion
I think people are missing the larger picture. Red Hat is an enterprise
trusted Linux, and it runs on zSeries, iSeries, and x86 platforms.
On zSeries mainframes it can run alongside z/OS. This gives IBM
control over a high performance Linux platform with a level of
reliability and transaction processing capability that x86 platforms can
only dream about.
Since it covers multiple architectures, IBM
can use it as a standard development platform. The Red Hat consultants
will be coming with the deal, of course, which instantly makes IBM the
premiere source of Red Hat consulting.
The name of the game here
is integration, not software revenue. I don't think the CentOS or
Fedora projects will be impacted. IBM isn't Oracle, after all...
Answer 1:
The overall IBM's reputation has also taken a deep dive during the last 15 years or so. IBM's recent history is littered with gigantic unreliable pieces of s... oftware. Basically you only buy IBM if you're working for the government and don't care about costs.
On the other hand, RedHat is a trusted company with extremely good reputation. Companies gladly buy RedHat subscriptions because they know that if they have an issue with some software package, RedHat can often put them into contact with the original developers of that package.
Of course, putting new emphasis on z/Linux helps to give Big Iron a boost, since it provides levels of service that can't be matched by any other on premise Linux solution (or, based on some recent outages, on cloud solutions either).
This isn't to say that mainframe are going to grow and take over the world. But putting Red Hat under Big Blue will extend how long they will be around.
(Favorite line from a client - "We are going to get rid of our mainframes five years ago...")
Mainframes are very "sticky" - it's hard to get out of them, as they are so specialized. That's why very few new customers even try them these days. Vendor lock-in is not a nice thing.
As for RH sticking longer under IBM, this is not a given. IBM has a history of killing projects through sheer bureaucracy.