IBM bought Red Hat - Thoughts from the cloud geeks perspective

IBM paid about $ 34 billion for a software company, which it described as the world's leading provider of open source cloud software. The company press release described the transaction as a game-changer in the cloud market. IBM becomes the # 1 hybrid cloud provider in the world, providing the only open cloud solution, unlocking the full value of the cloud for businesses.

I recently attended a few Red Hat events and tried digging that common theme for all their products and wondering how they fit into the field of clouds, and I couldn't really find one. OpenShift and Ansible are heavily buzzed, and RHEL has its place, but none of these are so-called mind blowers.

I have looked at the market from a public cloud perspective and I have noticed that all of those old-school hardware and software vendors are trying to invent themselves again in a cloud. But it seems to me that all of those are just lousy attempts and serves better private "cloud" than public clouds. And I just cannot stop thinking that could this case fall into the same category.

The usefulness of the private "cloud" and hybrid cloud has long been celebrated by IBM and others. Fujitsu, which just moments ago released its K5 cloud global shutdown, only 2 years after it opened in the Nordic countries and will now continue to heavily invest in Azure. For K5, I didn't initially predict a very long life.

I'm not convinced by IBM's cloud offering yet. Somehow, it seems that these old giants have not fully understood this culture of openness today, where prices, services, and new features are made available to users as soon as they are known.

of course, we sometimes get unmatured services from AWS, Azure, or Google, but through user feedback, those get better and faster. The pace of development is staggering. The services of the old giant, on the other hand, remain a bit distant and clumsy. Watson, however, seems to have something going on...at least I've seen some pretty nice demos.

Now IBM has bought a bunch of technology that it believes will help them do better in the hybrid cloud competition. Certainly, it´s seemingly easier to make solutions if you just think that containers are the only technology that should be used in the cloud. In my opinion, there are already more accessible solutions directly from AWS, Azure, and Google. Or have I missed something essential?