Hacker News Reader

Comment by zzzeek | Hacker News Reader

Red Hat employee here. Contrary to your "inserts a bunch of people" characterization, IBM wanted to get into hybrid cloud so they acquired Red Hat in one of the largest tech acquisitions in history, and we create hybrid clouds for our customers. As we are part of IBM now, IBM is in fact providing hybrid cloud to its customers from start to finish in a substantive way. So there's really no comparison to be made to technologies for which IBM has not made substantive investment.

View on HN

I'm working on many projects with RedHat, and have heavily dealt with IBM in the past.

I can definitely confirm that the IBM statement is true. Execs signed on many projects, and we were always stuck with a blue pile of unusable garbage at the end. For twice the price orginally agreed to...

Working with RedHat as of today is still, well, working with RedHat. Highly competent people building things that will run well for a long time, and (so far) still at a reasonable cost. I do start to see some changes on pricing (high increases are on the horizon...), and more red tape around things that don't fit in the standard boxes. So i'm trying to decouple some areas from being fully dependant to more standardized/vendor agnostic models to keep options opened (mainly in container space).

My Condolences. RedHat was an awesome company and helped make Linux and open source a success. I hope the bluewashing goes slow and you are able to have a good experience there for quite a while.

Different Red Hat employee here, that said, this opinion is my own and I have no real authority to say anything beyond my experience. I, in my job, have a lot of contact with IBM folks now for obvious reasons, but I think it's a slow Red washing rather than the other way around. The independence of Red Hat is fiercely defended and is largely respected, even by IBM. I think we all want this to work as it is, rather than make huge changes, especially culturally.

IBM employee here, can confirm (the Red-washing) after having developed a product that HAS to be running on OpenShift and HAS to go through RedHat's horrible scanning and catalog system. Of course this is in addition to IBM's existing horrible scanning and catalog registries. It's a red layer on top of existing blue layers of tape. It's multi-colored bureaucratic tape all the way down.

I'm sure RedHat can stave it off longer, but a fair amount of the Softlayer folks were optimistic at first too.

IBM never had a Softlayer president (and also paid an order of magnitude less than for Red Hats).

Red Hat employee here as well. Didn't feel any difference, it's still a great place to work, but I don't usually interact with IBM folks.

So it's becoming Big Red instead of Blue Hat? That's encouraging.

One could argue it’s already finished. I was hearing almost identical versions of “no, really, IBM is serious about cloud and that’s obvious from buying us” about a month after SoftLayer closed their deal. I’m starting to wonder if that messaging is in the acquisition welcome packet because the similarities to what my SoftLayer friends argued is remarkable (implying the next step, if history is predictive, is for half of Red Hat to leave and IBM to rename cloud offerings again).

I overheard that Rackspace exited the hybrid market entirely rather than accept IBM terms, which says a lot if true, but it’s watercooler chat and not worth much. It’s plausible because in an “architecture by strategic acquisition” endeavor one courts the cheap options first.

It always takes about 2 years for the corporate hegemony to take over a major acquisition, during which time they have been keeping the new staff under the impression that they bought them to change the acquirers culture not the other way around... then the real re-orgs start.

As an outsider interacting with folks from IBM and Red Hat, if I didn't know about the acquisition, I wouldn't have noticed any major change in their behaviours. So far IBM-in-the-large have been admirably hands off.

So far IBM-in-the-large have been admirably hands off.

Key words "so far". I'm sure people from Truven and all the other acquired companies that make (made?) up Watson Health would have said the same thing initially as well. Right up until they all got laid off...

Sure, but "yesterday's weather" is about a good a prediction as can be made.

I don't think the OP was claiming that IBM doesn't create hybrid clouds, because they clearly do. But "hybrid cloud" is definitely a buzzword right now.

Sure it's a "buzzword" but OP was claiming "Once those checks are cashed they drop everyone and move on to the next buzzword", as though IBM does not have substantive capabilities and investment in the hybrid cloud area. This is the opposite of reality. The phrase "inserts a bunch of people into existing processes and resources and claims credit " suggests IBM is not actually providing the service as well, also not the reality.

Some buzzwords have stronger underlying value than others. Hybrid Cloud is very critical for orgs that want to migrate or partly use cloud resources, say for moving capital expense to operating expense or for burst uses, but don’t want two different tool chains. IBM/RH’s offer is more flexible then Azure Stack or pieces of Google like Anthos, but the flexibility comes at a higher cost.

In any case, is buzzword but not the same variant of buzz as blockchain.

I somehow missed/forgot IBM bought Red Hat. Reading OP's comment, I certainly didn't had the impression we were talking about a 34 billion dollars acquisition.

Give it five years

Reply on news.ycombinator.com