IBM Announces Deal To Acquire Red Hat At $34 Billion
Assuming Bloomberg's reporting is accurate, IBM is nearly set to announce a deal to acquire Red Hat and they say it could be announced as soon as this Sunday. Per the Bloomberg news that hit the wire a few minutes ago.
Red Hat currently has a market cap of around 20 billion USD while IBM is currently valued at around 113 billion. While SUSE and some of the other smaller Linux vendors have changed hands many times, IBM acquiring Red Hat would certainly be the largest Linux software vendor acquisition to date.
Red Hat currently employs around 12,000 people and is the second largest contributor to the Linux kernel. Of course, IBM used to be in the operating system game itself with OS/2 while in the past number of years they have pretty much been a Linux shop for their enterprise servers on both z Systems and POWER9. It was back in 2001 when IBM announced their "$1 billion investment in Linux" and in 2013 did another billion dollar pledge. IBM POWER9 and RHEL has been a powerful combination recently in the super-computing space, most recently with the Sierra super-computer having just come online.
It would certainly be interesting to see what would be IBM's vision for Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Fedora, and the rest of Red Hat's open-source software portfolio. Let us know what you think in the forums of this possible IBM acquisition of Red Hat. Interesting times ahead especially with Ubuntu-maker Canonical potentially eyeing an IPO in the next two to three years.
So soon there could be announced a deal of a Big Blue Red Hat...
UPDATE (15:00 EST 28 Oct): The deal is a go! IBM has just announced their intention to acquire Red Hat at a total value of approximately $34 bilion. Red Hat would function as a distinct unit within the IBM Hybrid Cloud team. IBM is looking to acquire Red Hat to change the cloud landscape and become the world's number one hybrid cloud provider.
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