IBM to acquire Red Hat

Yesterday it was announced that IBM will acquire Red Hat for $34 billion dollars.  This is perhaps one of the most significant acquisitions in recent history in the information technology industry.  Red Hat is a leader in enterprise Linux and one of the main companies bringing open source software to the enterprise for quite a while.

In my opinion, it makes sense for IBM to supplant itself as one of the major players in the hybrid cloud game.  This acquisition will add yet another enterprise-class operating system platform to its portfolio that includes AIX on its Power hardware as well as z/OS on its mainframe systems.  Red Hat Enterprise Linux or RHEL can already run on Power and IBM Z series mainframes.

Time will only tell what will come of IBM’s purchase.  Both companies have been working together already for the past 20 years, I suppose it was only a matter of time that Red Hat became an official part of IBM.