Comment by chr15p | Hacker News Reader

Comment by chr15p | Hacker News Reader

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Other way round, IBM are hoping that a lot of their customers who aren't already big Red Hat customers can be converted to using RHEL and (especially) Openshift. They already have all the sales and delivery relationships in place that they need to do really big (like 100 million to billion dollar big) deals, much bigger then anything Red Hat has been able to sell on their own. They also have relationships to sell RHEL/Openshift to IBM customers that RH struggled to get through the door of. So if they can get big growth in the number and size of Red Hat deals by selling to their existing customers then they can grow RH massively and of course all growth in Red Hat deals is growth in IBMs profits.

And if they can sell some of them RHEL on POWER9 they will be very happy to take that money as well :)

And that's also a good defensive move.

Given the market is moving, even IBM's major customers would eventually migrate to newer technologies. (On the order of decades)

By providing something that mostly satisfies that need, IBM essentially drilled a relief well to take the pressure off. When they're ready to migrate, they could get 80% value of what a non-IBM migration would get them by moving to IBM's product.

For a lot of large, slow, conservative orgs, that's good enough.

kinda, I mean, IBM consulting have been happy to move customers off legacy IBM/AIX/DB2 onto Dell kit running Oracle on windows for decades now if thats what the customer wanted and was prepared to pay, precisely because its better to take the services revenue and the reseller margin then lose everything. So that relief well was drilled years ago, and certainly the name IBM helped with persuading those slow conservative orgs to use their services, but this predates the Red Hat acquisition by a looong time. IBM have been a major reseller of RHEL for those migrations for years, this just means they take the software as well as the services revenue, and (they hope) can sell RH software into more of those conservative accounts by bundling it under the IBM family.

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