IBM announced Tuesday that it has officially closed its acquisition of Red Hat, which has been called one of the largest tech acquisitions of all time.
First news of the acquisition came in October with IBM acquiring the company which was co-founded by Canadian entrepreneur Bob Young for $34 billion USD. At the time it was called either the second or third-largest tech acquisition of all time.
“The acquisition of Red Hat is a complete game changer for the entire industry…signaling a new era as hybrid cloud adoption rates soar.”
Red Hat provides open source software solutions, delivering Linux, hybrid cloud, container, and Kubernetes technologies. According to ZDNet, Red Hat was the first billion-dollar pure play open source company.
“The acquisition of Red Hat is a game-changer,” said Ginni Rometty, IBM chairman, president, and CEO previously stated. “It changes everything about the cloud market. IBM will become the world’s #1 hybrid cloud provider, offering companies the only open cloud solution that will unlock the full value of the cloud for their businesses.
The company reasserted the statement today noting that, “the acquisition of Red Hat is a complete game changer for the entire industry; not only asserting IBM as the leading hybrid cloud provider, but also signaling a new era as hybrid cloud adoption rates soar.”
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With the acqusition complete IBM stated that its clients will “begin benefitting” from the partnership by the end of the summer. It also stated plans to introduce a “next-generation hybrid multicloud platform,” noting that central to the platform is an infrastructure-independent common operating environment that runs anywhere—from any data center to multiple clouds.
IBM also addressed one of the major concerns that arose from Red Hat users when the acquisition was announced, reemphasizing, as it did in October, that Red Hat will preserve its independence and neutrality from the tech giant.
“As we’ve said many times, Red Hat’s culture, industry partnerships and commitment to open source remain unchanged,” IBM stated.
IBM and Red Hat’s partnership has spanned 20 years, with IBM serving as an early supporter of Linux. IBM collaborated with Red Hat to develop and grow enterprise-grade Linux, and more recently to bring enterprise Kubernetes and hybrid cloud solutions to customers. IBM previously stated that these creations have become core technologies within IBM’s $19 billion hybrid cloud business.
