14 DAY TRIAL // Red Hat Inc. announces that IBM has bought the Linux provider company for $34 billion in an attempt to become the leading hybrid cloud solutions provider.
Jim Whitehurst, Red Hat's president and CEO, broke the news a few hours ago when he shared an email with the Red Hat associates to inform them that a deal was made between IBM (International Business Machines Corporation), a multinational information technology company, to acquire Red Hat for 34 billion US dollars. With this move, they want to create a leading hybrid cloud provider.
"We have barely scratched the surface of the opportunity that is ahead of us. Open source is the future of enterprise IT. We believe our total addressable market to be $73 billion by 2021. If software is eating the world - and with digital transformation occurring across industries, it truly is - open source is the key ingredient," said Red Hat president and CEO Jim Whitehurst.
Powered by IBM
With more than 25 years of experience, Red Hat is no doubt the world's leading provider of Open Source and Linux-based software solutions for enterprises with its large catalog of products, including the well-known Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) operating system series. In 2017 alone, Red Hat announced revenue of US$2.9 billion, and in 2018, the company said that it made a net income of US$258.80 million.
Red Hat is also known for providing integrated technologies that help enterprises build and manage an open, private IaaS (Infrastructure-as-a-Service) cloud. However, due to IBM acquiring Red Hat, it will boost the Linux company to dramatically scale and accelerate its mission, in an attempt to beat Microsoft, Google, and Amazon in becoming the world's number one cloud provider.
After the acquisition, Jim Whitehurst said that Red Hat will remain Red Hat as we know it, but they'll now have more power and money to invest in Open Source innovation, providing broader customer and partner relationships. "Our unwavering commitment to open source innovation remains unchanged," Jim Whitehurst noted in the email announcement.