When the news of IBM's acquisition of Red Hat was announced, employees of the largest open source software company didn't take it too well.
But it looks like life will continue as before for Red Hat employees. The big difference? The company will be able to use IBM's vast resources.
With IBM, Red Hat will maintain its autonomy. CEO Jim Whitehurst and his current management team will continue to lead the company. Red Hat will retain its existing facilities, brands, and unique Red Hat leadership style.
The last thing IBM wants right now is to turn Red Hat into another brand name for the company. Arvind Krishna, IBM's senior vice president for hybrid cloud, said: "Red Hat must and will remain independent."
This idea is not as radical as it sounds. Too many parts of IBM have been given enormous freedoms. On the outside, the company appears to operate as a monolithic kingdom, but in reality it is a subset of kingdoms under the same name.
For example, all of Red Hat's open source programs and operating systems, including Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), CentOS, Fedora, CoreOS, Ansible, WildFly (formerly JBoss), and many others, will continue to be developed as before. In addition, all of Red Hat's open source programs, such as the OpenStack cloud, will continue to be supported.
Paul Cormier, president of Red Hat products and technologies, said the acquisition will have no impact on the company's day-to-day operations.
The day we close, there will be nothing different, it will be business as usual with the same roadmaps and we will continue to do what is right for the community. There will be no changes, I don't know how else to put it, there will be no change in the way we work with the Linux community.
Additionally, Red Hat will continue to support all of its existing partners. Yes, that includes IBM's cloud competitors.
“Red Hat will continue to support existing partnerships with other cloud providers,” Cormier said. These partners include Microsoft with Azure, Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud.
The company's merger and acquisition concerns the Cloud.
Cormier states:
We're not an open source company. We're a software company with an open source development model. The secret of Red Hat is that we've put those two things together. And IBM on the other hand has a huge history of enterprise software and open source development.
So it looks like IBM will continue to be a force in enterprise software services and Red Hat will continue to be a dominant open source player. Together, they hope to become the greatest hybrid cloud force in the 21st century.
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