During the Red Hat Summit 2019, the mantra of the Red Hat employees present is that no one should talk about the proposed acquisition by IBM. Nevertheless, CEO Jim Whitehurst of the supplier of open source solutions lifted a very small corner of the veil on this apparently tricky issue. Among other things, the acquisition by IBM was the best choice to continue to grow and to bring open source even more to the business world.
The IBM takeover may not be raised in public, but everyone at Red Hat is working on it. The main reason why the open source specialist does not comment on the merger is that the proposed acquisition is still the subject of research by various market forces, such as in the US and in Europe.
However, Whitehurst was able to tell the assembled EMEA press in a meeting attended by Techzine that this week the competent authorities in the US have given their full consent to the takeover. It is now a matter of waiting for the approval of the European Union.
Best choice for Red Hat
The CEO further stated that the acquisition by IBM was the best thing that could happen to the open source supplier in order to be able to continue to grow in the near future. The acquisition will give Red Hat access to much more scale, money and other opportunities to expand and accelerate the company’s operations in the corporate market, especially the enterprise market. Whitehurst states that this would not have been possible with a takeover or through investments by a venture capitalist.
34 billion dollars
By the end of October 2018, IBM took the provider of open source solutions for an amount of about 39 billion U.S. dollars deposited for the open source vendor. Upon finalisation of the acquisition, Red Hat will become a separate part of Big Blue’s Hybrid Cloud division. In principle, there will be no major changes, such as maintaining Red Hat’s head office, facilities, brands and working methods. Jim Whitehurst and Red Hat’s current management team will continue to lead the company. Jim Whitehurst will report directly to CEO Ginni Rometty of IBM.
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.
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