Plus it's pretty clear they know how to do layoffs and that knowledge may be applied to RH soon to boost profitability.
You may well be right, indeed that was along the lines of my initial thought about this and would explain the size and scale of investment. Then if RH fails as they would currently to keep up those interest payments, then accountants can just rub their hands and use that debt to offset profits down the line.
Time will tell, certainly IBM has the kit and for years had its own dark fiber internet backbone globally, so have been well placed for years to capture the cloud market, yet failed to move on. Which for a company that saw a shift towards service offerings, was probably a big source of embarrassment internally at some levels.
In my experience IP corresponds specifically to legally recognised property in otherwise copyable information.
It seems like the idea behind the Red Hat acquisition would be to increase the cloud division revenue and keep roughly the same profit margin, which in theory could be great for their bottom line, especially if Red Hat is growing quickly (is it?).
The arm chair CEO in me doesn't see how this adds up, though. Red Hat seems pretty pricey. I just don't see how Red Hat competes with AWS, Azure, and GCP moving forward, and I don't really see how it plays nicely / fits into those clouds either. I also don't see how it would make IBM's cloud more attractive. I can see how it could make IBM's cloud more profitable, but it seems like a stretch, given what they paid for Red Hat.
From that perspective, community adoption of k8 benefits Google.
Kubernetes is realy a free, uncontrollable , widely installed (on prem and cloud) infrastructure, that compete directly with the clouds. Think of the iphone app store, without any apps (yet), and not controlled by apple.
The reason that companies pays for cloud services (which are 20x the real cost of hardware) is to off load the human cost in managing their infrastructure, and to get hold of cloud native infrastructure (I.e. infra as code, fully scalable).
However, with kubernetes you can create your own automatic robots (aka operator) which would replace the costly admins by taking care of application management. And at the same time you architect to a portable API layer.
It doesn't. Their cloud tech, OpenShift, runs on top of the others. Kubernetes can sit on top of that. It makes private clouds portable (kind of).
So far, Red Hat plays in a field slightly different than AWS/GCP/Azure. Our customers mainly want something _on premise_, something on their machines, their datacenter, behind their firewall. Most of our customers don't want to, or can't, hold their data on machines they don't physically own.