Tag: acquisitions

F5 acquires NGINX

NGINX, the company behind one of the most popular web servers, has been acquired by F5. Of course, I’m glad for the NGINX team and founders, for who this is quite an accomplishment. But at the same time, much like many of the recent acquisitions, this one worries me. NGINX and F5 were competing in certain areas. That competition is now gone.

As always, they say that they will keep NGINX brand, team, technology, and even invest more in the Open Source side of things. But I’m not holding my breath. We’ve seen way too many screw ups on that front in the last few years.

Having the Open Source offering is good though. If it continues to grow and develop – even better. But if not, at least there is an option of forking, rebranding, and building on top.

IBM To Acquire Red Hat


Here are some huge news to wake up to on this Monday Morning: IBM To Acquire Red Hat, Completely Changing The Cloud Landscape And Becoming World’s #1 Hybrid Cloud Provider.

That’s a lot to process in the morning.  But if Red Hat was to be acquired by someone, I think IBM is one of the better choices.  The deal size is $34 billion … and people are still saying that there is no way to make money with Open Source Software.

Here’s the story at Slashdot, which will get quite a few flame wars as the day progresses.




Red Hat to Acquire CoreOS


Red Hat issued a press release announcing that it has signed a definitive agreement to acquire CoreOS Inc.

RALEIGH, N.C. —  — Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE: RHT), the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, today announced that it has signed a definitive agreement to acquire CoreOS, Inc., an innovator and leader in Kubernetes and container-native solutions, for a purchase price of $250 million, subject to certain adjustments at closing that are not expected to be material. Red Hat’s acquisition of CoreOS will further its vision of enabling customers to build any application and deploy them in any environment with the flexibility afforded by open source. By combining CoreOS’s complementary capabilities with Red Hat’s already broad Kubernetes and container-based portfolio, including Red Hat OpenShift, Red Hat aims to further accelerate adoption and development of the industry’s leading hybrid cloud platform for modern application workloads.
I find it to be very significant.  Have a look at other Red Hat acquisitions, especially lately, as well as their other programs and projects.




Red Hat acquires Ansible


Linux Weekly News reports that Red Hat acquires Ansible.  There are quite a few configuration management tools around, and it was only the matter of time until Red Hat, with all its corporate client base, would buy one.  Or pledge allegiance.  My personal preference would be in Puppet, but Puppet comes from the Ruby world, where’s Red Hat is more of a Python shop.

Ansible’s simple and agentless approach, unlike competing solutions, does not require any special coding skills, removing some of the most significant barriers to automation across IT. From deployment and configuration to rolling upgrades, by adding Ansible to its hybrid management portfolio, Red Hat will help customers to:

  • Deploy and manage applications across private and public clouds.
  • Speed service delivery through DevOps initiatives.
  • Streamline OpenStack installations and upgrades.
  • Accelerate container adoption by simplifying orchestration and configuration.

The upstream Ansible project is one of the most popular open source automation projects on GitHub with an active and highly engaged community, encompassing nearly 1,200 contributors. Ansible automation is being used by a growing number of Fortune 100 companies, powering large and complex private cloud environments, and the company has received several notable accolades, including a 2015 InfoWorld Bossie Award, recognizing the best open source datacenter and cloud software.

Regardless, though, of my personal preferences, these are good news for configuration management and automation.




Dell to by EMC for $67 billion


Bloomberg reports on a largest technology acquisition ever (excluding telephony):

Dell Inc. agreed to buy EMC Corp. for about $67 billion in the largest technology acquisition ever, creating a corporate-computing giant that will use a wider product lineup to woo customers as demand slows and competition stiffens.

Dell plans to pay $24.05 a share in cash plus tracking stock in EMC’s prize holding,VMware Inc., valued at about $9 for each EMC share, the companies said in a statement Monday. The price of $33.15 a share is 28 percent above EMC’s closing level on Oct. 7, just before reports surfaced that a deal was in the works.