IBM Closes Landmark Acquisition of Red Hat for $34 Billion

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With cloud, the future is bright!.  IBM (NYSE:IBM) and Red Hat announced  that they have closed the transaction under which IBM acquired all of the issued and outstanding common shares of Red Hat for $190.00 per share in cash, representing a total equity value of approximately $34 billion. Hybrid cloud is an emerging $1 Trillion market. That could be achieved , if you can move data and applications across multiple clouds and make that portable. For that , you got to be hybrid, multi-cloud, Open , secure end-to-end and have multi-cloud management. Big Blue’s big reveal is the release of IBM Cloud Paks: the wholesale containerisation of IBM software that plugs into Red Hat’s OpenShift Platform-as-a-Service (Paas). IBM says over 100 of its key software offerings will now run on any cloud – from Alibaba to Azure, Google Cloud Platform to AWS – as it reveals the results of a major integration effort with newly acquired Red Hat.

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Acquisition positions IBM as the leading hybrid cloud provider and accelerates IBM’s high-value business model, extending Red Hat’s open source innovation to a broader range of clients. IBM preserves Red Hat’s independence and neutrality. Red Hat will strengthen its existing partnerships to give customers freedom, choice and flexibility. Red Hat’s unwavering commitment to open source remains unchanged. Red Hat OpenShift is a hybrid cloud, enterprise Kubernetes platform. Together, IBM and Red Hat will deliver next-generation hybrid multicloud platform.

IBM said: “This is the software that keeps the world’s largest systems moving – from ATMs to flight control instruments – and is trusted by 96 of the Top 100 global banks, nine of the top 10 car brands and eight of the world’s Top 10 airlines. Enterprises don’t want to build on a proprietary stack alone.  That’s why the launch of IBM Cloud Paks on Red Hat is so powerful – it enables enterprises to expedite the shift of their core business apps to the cloud in a secure and consistent way.What cloud brings to the table is easy consumption of related pieces of software. So Cloud Paks are not really products; they’re capabilities.“Containerisation is easy.  Bringing it into a Kubernetes platform with all of the orchestration capabilities, whether it’s scaling it, or whether it is finding the right place to play, is hard. It’s not just about packaging software into a little container, it’s about how you bring it into an orchestrated, multi-container, scalable environment that gives you not just deployment benefits but operational benefits.

IBM goes cloud-native with Red Hat OpenShift- that this initiative is "optimised" to run on the OpenShift containerisation platform. This, the company claims, will allow customers to build mission-critical apps once and then run them on most public clouds, including AWS, Azure, Google Cloud Platform, Alibaba and, of course, its own IBM Cloud.

After closing a $34 billion deal that redefines the IT landscape, Big Blue has released five Cloud Paks—integrated middleware that sits on top of OpenShift, Red Hat's container management platform and now IBM's official Kubernetes platform of choice. In its cloud-native form, IBM's software will be offered as pre-integrated, containerised modules called IBM Cloud Paks. The five Cloud Paks are all IBM-certified and enterprise-ready.

1) The Applications Cloud Pak offers a platform to build, test and deploy apps with a modern,    micro-services framework, including developer tools and Red Hat runtimes.

2) The Integration Cloud Pak enables a modern approach to integrating apps, data, cloud services    and APIs.

3) The Multi-Cloud Management Cloud Pak gives customers consistent visibility into governance across environments, both on- and off-premises to handle the "new reality of the hybrid multi-cloud world.

4) The Automation Cloud Pak helps transform business processes, decisions and automate tasks, including management of content.

5) The Data Cloud Pak helps store, analyze and extract value from data, and enable artificial intelligence.

Consistency and choice is what it's providing -  Consistency in environment, choice to run it in any infrastructure you want, public or private, all within a supported and secure framework.  The real opportunity is around enabling partners together. A lot of IBM partners are starting to build out Red Hat practices and Red Hat partners are doing the same, and the Cloud Paks are a great entry point.

In addition to Cloud Paks, IBM made three other Red Hat-centred announcements .

The first is Red Hat OpenShift on IBM Cloud, a "flexible, fully-managed service" that the company claims will "help enterprises modernise and migrate to a hybrid cloud infrastructure".

The second is the news that Red Hat OpenShift is now available for IBM Z and LinuxONE, having previously only been available on Power Systems and Storage.

Finally, there are new consultancy and technology services available from IBM for Red Hat. 

Before it officially announced those products, IBM had introduced predecessors such as ICP for Data, Multi-Cloud Manager and Cloud Automation Manager.

The end result: users can run most IBM software like database management tool DB2, or machine learning platform Watson Studio (even some mainframe applications) pretty much anywhere that OpenShift runs. Use of the new features will reduce development time by up to 84 percent and operational expenses by up to 75 percent, IBM claims. Enterprises want a large software ecosystem running on a common platform; think of the Internet as an analogy. This has the potential to really make that happen. Hybrid cloud, multicloud are a focal area for innovation: how do you place workloads? With the emergence of things like 5G, moving AI to the edge; IoT processing at the edge. The platform and the middleware (from applications to databases); those two layers coming to together is really going to accelerate innovation.

IBM Mono2Micro is available now in WebSphere Hybrid Edition. It’s the latest example of a cutting-edge IBM Research innovation that uses AI to transform how companies develop, deploy and operate their IT across any hybrid cloud environment using Red Hat OpenShift. This builds on the success of IBM’s organic R&D with innovations like IBM Cloud Pak for Watson AIOps to help enterprises apply AI to the full scope of their IT estates.

IBM expands its automation capabilities with the WDG acquisition. WDG Soluções Em Sistemas E Automação De Processos LTDA is a Brazilian software provider of robotic process automation (RPA). WDG provides RPA, Intelligent Automation (IA), Interactive Voice Response (IVR) and chatbots primarily to customers in Latin America. WDG's capabilities are comparable to Softomotive, which was acquired by Microsoft. The acquisition aligns well with IBM's strategy and immediately checks three boxes. First, WDG capabilities will be integrated with IBM's CloudPak that offers AI-driven solutions for data capture, orchestrating workflow, monitoring and reporting, and decision management. IBM will deploy about 600 pre-built WDG automation activities in CloudPak. Second, WDG technology will be embedded with IBM Watson AIOps that automates processes to detect, identify and respond to IT issues. Finally, IBM brings RPA and AI-driven chatbot capabilities in house. IBM will continue its partnerships with the big 3 (UiPath, AutomationAnywhere, BluePrism), but this will give IBM more leverage to win customers. As a result, IBM can combine RPA with its own automation platform, professional services delivery and product pricing (and create automation-as-a-service). With this in mind, IBM is able to leverage RPA as loss-leader in return for larger automation plays.

With the acquisition of Instana, IBM offers industry-leading, AI-powered automation capabilities to manage the complexity of modern applications that span hybrid cloud landscapes. Clients get a leading enterprise observability platform to drive automated remediation, powered by Instana’s contextualized data with metrics, traces, profiles, and dependency mapping. In addition, existing IBM monitoring clients will have a path forward to preserve their existing investment and take advantage of the modern observability features of Instana. With the added responsibility of ensuring the build and run quality of the software they develop, DevOps teams need a new generation of application performance monitoring and observability capabilities to succeed. Instana's observability capabilities combined with IBM's AI-powered automation capabilities across hybrid cloud environments will give clients a full view of their application performance to best optimize operations. Instana will offer both SaaS and on-premises solutions depending on the client's unique needs.

IBM'sacquisition of Turbonomic, Inc., an Application Resource Management (ARM) and Network Performance Management (NPM) software provider based in Boston, MA. Turbonomic capabilities add value to the Cisco Intersight Workload Optimizer, providing users with a top-down, application-driven approach to ensure applications continually get the resources they need to perform.  This helps IBM to build the future of AI-driven cross-cloud application operations. Also, with demand for 5G adoption rising, enterprises are also looking to move workloads to the edge. This is driving networking to be an integral component of the application deployment strategy.  With this acquisition, IBM will leverage Turbonomic's NPM products and strong presence in the telecommunications industry to complement its own offerings and expertise in this area, helping customers intelligently optimize applications running in 5G environments. 

Instana  and Turbonomic to assure application performance:

Instana can Ingest all observability metrics, tracing every request and profiling every process, breaking down the complex, constant changing application environment.​ Turbonomic uses AI-Powered actions to dynamically resource application to absorb shifting user demands and deliver target response times.

Instana & Turbonomic provides a closed-loop solution to continuously assure application performance and eliminate waste due to overprovisioning.. Turbonomic’s ARM software combined with Instana’s APM observability capabilities enables customers to validate all resource actions with application response time metrics to assure application performance and governance. 

IBM Corp. announced that it has inked a deal to acquire BoxBoat Technologies Inc., a Maryland-based consultancy focused on helping Fortune 100 companies and government agencies adopt software containers. IBM expects the deal to accelerate adoption of its OpenShift platform. OpenShift is the company’s software platform for building and running containerized applications in the cloud. IBM clients require a cloud architecture that allows them to operate across a traditional IT environment, private cloud and public clouds. That’s at the heart of  IBM's hybrid cloud approach. Overall, IBM estimates that the cloud professional services market is worth $200 billion annually. Previously, IBM purchased Taos Inc. and Nordcloud Ltd., which had annual revenues of more than $61 million at the time of the acquisition.

BoxBoat consultancy firm provides assistance to organizations that don’t have the necessary technical know-how to deploy containers on their own. One of the firm’s areas of expertise is containerizing companies’ existing applications. Because containers can improve the efficiency of software, many enterprises are adopting the technology not only to build new applications but also to modernize legacy workloads. Legacy applications are typically based on a monolithic architecture, meaning that their subcomponents are fused together into a single piece of software. Container applications, in contrast, are typically based on a microservices architecture. Their components are not fused together but rather operate as separate modules each running in a different container. Turning a monolithic application into a microservices-oriented workload requires breaking up its components into separate modules. BoxBoat also helps clients with related tasks. The firm works with organizations set up  infrastructure environments, in the public cloud or elsewhere, to run their newly containerized applications. Optionally, it can take on the day-to-day maintenance of those applications to free up resources for a company’s in-house information technology teams. For software development teams, in turn, BoxBoat offers assistance with setting up DevOps pipelines. A DevOps pipe is a collection of software tools that enables a company’s developers to build applications faster by automating time-consuming tasks.

IBM announced an agreement to acquire Bluetab Solutions Group  to extend its portfolio of data and hybrid cloud consulting services. Bluetab will become a strategic part of IBM's data services consulting practice to further advance its hybrid cloud and AI strategy.Bluetab is an IT Services boutique serving large corporations in the highly specialized Data Solutions space: Data Strategy, Data Management, Data Analytics and Data Cloud Services. With a deep engineering culture and a skilled and motivated team of more than 700 data experts, Bluetab deploys the full spectrum of services necessary to design and implement best-in-class data solutions. 

This highlights on  IBM's continued focus on providing organizations with a one-stop shop of AI-powered automation capabilities for business and IT all built on Red Hat OpenShift, helping to automate their entire enterprise, from robotic process automation (RPA), to AIOps, ARM and process mining. This is the latest move in a series of recent IBM acquisitions – including myInvenio, Instana and WDG Automation; ecosystem partnerships; organic R&D – including the launch of Cloud Pak for Watson AIOps; and customer adoption by leading brands -including CaixaBank, PNC Financial Services and Banco Popular.

IBM is the world’s largest IT Services company, a market leader in hybrid cloud solutions, complemented by strong AI capabilities. IBM looks forward to build the future of AI-driven cross-cloud application management to help customers accelerate their journey to hybrid cloud and AI.