Excuse my ignorance here but what software does Red Hat make that makes them worth 34B?
That's what every financial analyst is asking. It's a long-term play for IBM, but quite a bit to put up-front. I guess IBM really didn't a
'bidding war' to start, but over a 60% premium?
it definitely is an odd move for them but red hat has definitely made a great name for themselves. i hope ibm doesnt screw it up.
Word from the inside is that a lot of Red Fedoras are worried it'll be much like the Oracle Sun purchase -- so not good for them long-term. I've already heard Whitehurst's name cursed more than once by a few.
I had my positives and negatives with Whitehurst in my time there. He really brought the company out of the sub-1,000 employee mode, but he silo'd things up that hurt a lot of internal collaboration and sales. But it was also because the company grew so fast too.
I knew my time was limited when I was in a meeting and they talked about something I (along with a subordinate of mine) basically created on our own, and didn't know. It had grown into a 9 figure project by that point, and IBM still gets far more credit for it than myself.
Although it was funny when a recruiter at Red Hat reached out to me about joining, and didn't realize I had named the division they wanted me to work at. I refused to re-join without getting some of my stock grants back (I left in late 2014 with 2 years left of bonus grants on the table), so I would only work as a contractor making 2x as much as I used to as an employee.
At some point there is the principle of it all, given how much money I directly (let alone indirectly) made for them -- ironically being 100% post-sales (which is why I have sales people who love me there still). It's something several of my late managers never understood, and wondered why some customers dropped Red Hat, despite my best efforts.
My resignation date as a direct employee still matches Brian Stevens' (who I've known since '01), who left to head Kubernetes at Google.
