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.