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Red Hat has been definitively acquired by IBM. Both companies announced this today. Big Blue pays a total of $34 billion for the open source specialist and advocate of the hybrid cloud.

The acquisition should enable customers to switch even more easily to hybrid (multi) cloud environments. Especially when it comes to being able to manage and secure these environments. The combination of the two companies can provide the entire technology stack for this, says Chairman, President and CEO Ginni Rometty of IBM in a comment.

According to Red Hat’s CEO Jim Whitehurst, the acquisition is also good for the wider use of open source. Especially when it comes to the best way to build any application or workload and roll it out anywhere, from the edge, via the (own) data centre to the (multi)cloud. In his opinion, the takeover by a party like Big Blue was always the best thing that could happen to his company.

Red Hat remains independent

As Ginni Rometty indicated earlier, Red Hat will continue to operate as a fully independent part of the entire IBM group. However, it will be part of the Big Blues Cloud and Cognitive Software segment. Jim Whitehurst will remain in charge and will report directly to Rometty. It will also be part of IBM’s senior management team.

Nothing is going to change in terms of product portfolio either. Red Hat continues to develop, supply and distribute its own products, as does IBM, according to Executive Vice President and President, Products and Technologies Paul Cormier of the open source specialist during a press briefing on the occasion of the final acquisition. Big Blue has no intention of tampering with this.

OpenShift becomes hybrid standard

IBM will, however, fully embrace Red Hat OpenShift as the basic platform for a hybrid model, according to Senior Vice President Arvind Krishna of IBM Cloud & Cognitive Software. This means that when the vendor talks about a hybrid cloud platform, it means Red Hat OpenShift. All of IBM’s middleware products will be built in the future to lead back to Red Hat’s open source cloud platform, he added.

In short, the acquisition, which has now been finalised, should bring both companies the scale they need to grow even more and become the real, more enviable and market leader of the hybrid cloud. We are curious to see how this interesting fusion will manifest itself in the coming years.

This news article was automatically translated from Dutch to give Techzine.eu a head start. All news articles after September 1, 2019 are written in native English and NOT translated. All our background stories are written in native English as well. For more information read our launch article.