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Comment by codec01 | Hacker News Reader

This is total bullshit. Pivotal’s stock is $10 now, how the hell does your “back channel source” claim they have more paid customers than Red Hat? At Summit Red Hat had 1000 paid customer references. This guy must be short IBM to put out this kind of crap.

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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.

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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