ARMONK (UNITED STATES). International Business Machines (IBM) has closed the largest purchase in its 108-year history with the acquisition of 34,000 million dollars (30,343 million euros) from the open source software provider (open source) Red Hat, which will maintain its headquarters in Raleigh (North Carolina), as well as its brand, according to the multinational.
The transaction, agreed at the end of last October, involves the payment in cash of 190 dollars for each Red Hat title, which will operate as a separate unit within IBM and will continue to be led by Jim Whitehurst, who will join the senior team of the multinational and will report directly to Ginni Rometty, president and CEO of IBM.
“Companies are beginning the next chapter of their digital reinventions, infrastructure modernization and transfer of critical workloads between private clouds and multiple clouds from multiple vendors,” said Ginni Rometty, stressing that flexible technologies will be necessary to manage these hybrid environments. multiple clouds.
“IBM and Red Hat are uniquely adapted to respond to these needs,” added the executive.
IBM’s business revenue in the cloud has grown from 4% of the company’s total in 2013 to 25% today. In the last twelve months until last March, IBM’s cloud business exceeded 19,000 million dollars (16,953 million euros) and the purchase of Red Hat is expected to contribute two points to the annual growth of IBM in a period of five years.
Red Hat revenues in its fiscal year 2019 totaled 3,400 million dollars (3,034 million euros), 15% more. In the first quarter of its fiscal year 2020, which ended in June, Red Hat’s revenues reached 934 million dollars (833 million euros), 15% higher than the figure for the same period of the previous year.
The European Commission approved without conditions on June 27 the purchase of Red Hat by IBM, concluding that the operation will not pose problems over the competition of the single market, noting that IBM could have incentives to use the complementary capabilities of Red Hat for develop and offer hybrid cloud solutions, which would give more options to client companies to more easily distribute the work letter between their own servers and numerous public and private cloud services. (Europa Press)
