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IBM To Buy Linux Distributor Red Hat For $33.4 Billion

Duncan 2351 Views 0 Comments ,  ,  1 min read

IBM agreed to buy software maker Red Hat for $33.4 billion in a bid to catch up in the cloud computing industry.

IBM will pay $190 a share in cash for Red Hat, according to a statement confirming an earlier Bloomberg News report. That’s a 63 percent premium over Red Hat’s closing price of $116.68 per share on Friday.

“The acquisition of Red Hat is a game-changer. It changes everything about the cloud market,” said Ginni Rometty, IBM’s chairman and chief executive officer, in the statement.

This acquisition brings together the best-in-class hybrid cloud providers and will enable companies to securely move all business applications to the cloud. Companies today are already using multiple clouds. However, research shows that 80 percent of business workloads have yet to move to the cloud, held back by the proprietary nature of today’s cloud market. This prevents portability of data and applications across multiple clouds, data security in a multi-cloud environment and consistent cloud management.IBM and Red Hat will be strongly positioned to address this issue and accelerate hybrid multi-cloud adoption. Together, they will help clients create cloud-native business applications faster, drive greater portability and security of data and applications across multiple public and private clouds, all with consistent cloud management. In doing so, they will draw on their shared leadership in key technologies, such as Linux, containers, Kubernetes, multi-cloud management, and cloud management and automation.

IBM’s and Red Hat’s partnership has spanned 20 years, with IBM serving as an early supporter of Linux, collaborating with Red Hat to help develop and grow enterprise-grade Linux and more recently to bring enterprise Kubernetes and hybrid cloud solutions to customers. These innovations have become core technologies within IBM’s $19 billion hybrid cloud business. Between them, IBM and Red Hat have contributed more to the open source community than any other organization.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) is one of the most popular operating systems for running public, private and hybrid cloud workloads.

Read the full statement from Red Hat here



Duncan

Duncan is a technology professional with over 20 years experience of working in various IT roles. He has a interest in cyber security, and has a wide range of other skills in radio, electronics and telecommunications.

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