IBM this week reaffirmed its commitment to preserving an independent Red Hat channel in the wake of closing a historic $34 billion acquisition of the largest provider of open source software.
Moreover, IBM has no plans to provide Red Hat direct or indirect sales teams any additional incentives to sell additional IBM products and services, says Arvind Krishna, senior vice president for cloud and cognitive software at IBM. In fact, the IBM and Red Hat cultures will remain completely distinct from one another, promises Krishna.
Nor does IBM plan to rationalize any of the middleware offerings where there is some overlap between the existing portfolios of Red Hat and IBM, says Krishna.
“Red Hat stays Red Hat,” says Krishna.
Despite that lack of integration, however, IBM insists that owning Red Hat will expand its opportunities to drive hybrid cloud computing solutions based on distributions of Linux and Kubernetes. Those efforts will justify the merger by driving additional profits in year two of the merger, says Krishna.
IBM this week didn’t provide much detail in terms of how that plan will come to fruition. There are, however, large numbers of IBM customers that don’t currently do business with Red Hat even though the two companies have enjoyed a reseller alliance spanning multiple decades.
From a Red Hat perspective, the merger with IBM will accelerate its existing hybrid cloud computing strategy by at least five years, says Paul Cormier, executive vice president and president for products and technologies for Red Hat.
“We’ll be able to scale faster,” says Cormier.
Despite being owned by IBM, however, Red Hat is especially committed to maintaining relationships with IBM rivals as an independent business unit, adds Cormier.
IBM owning Red Hat is not all that different from Dell Technologies owning VMware with perhaps the exception that Dell EMC engineers do work closely with their VMware counterparts to optimize various offerings. It remains to be seen if there will be any similar cross pollination between IBM and Red Hat.
In the meantime, as far as Red Hat and IBM are now concerned, it is business as usual.
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