d******d 发帖数: 6 | 1 IBM is acquiring Red Hat, a major distributor of open-source software and
technology, in a deal valued around $34 billion, the companies announced on
Sunday.
According to a joint statement, IBM will pay cash to buy all shares in Red
Hat at $190 each. Shares in Red Hat closed at $116.68 on Friday before the
deal was announced.
The open source, enterprise software maker will become a unit of IBM’s
Hybrid Cloud division, with Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst joining IBM’s senior
management team and reporting to CEO Ginni Rometty.
J.P. Morgan advised IBM and is leading the financing for the Red Hat deal.
The acquisition is by far IBM’s largest deal ever, and the third-biggest in
the history of U.S. tech. Excluding the AOL-Time Warner merger, the only
larger deals were the $67 billion merger between Dell and EMC in 2016 and
JDS Uniphase’s $41 billion acquisition of optical-component supplier SDL in
2000, just as the dot-com bubble was bursting.
Red Hat started 25 years ago as a distributor of a particular flavor of
Linux, an open-source operating system that is commonly used in server
computers that power company data centers. Today, Red Hat is known for
distributing and supporting Red Hat Enterprise Linux, as well as other
technologies commonly used in data centers. The company, which went public
at the peak of the dot-com boom in 1999, earned $259 million on revenue of $
2.92 billion in its last fiscal year, which ended Feb. 28. Its revenue grew
21% between the 2017 and 2018 fiscal years.
Rometty told CNBC that the deal should not be interpreted as part of any
plan for her to transition out of her position as CEO at IBM.
“I’m still young and I’m not going anywhere,” she told CNBC.
IBM will pause share repurchases in 2020 and 2021, but won’t touch its
dividend. The pause is a cautionary measure as the company plans on
returning to its normal leverage ratio in about two years.
Open source has been the biggest theme in technology this year. Prior to IBM
’s purchase of Red Hat, two of the biggest tech deals of the year were
Microsoft’s $7.5 billion purchase of GitHub, a code-sharing service, and
Salesforce’s $6.5 billion acquisition of MuleSoft, whose technology
stitches together disparate software applications, data and devices. Earlier
this month, big-data rivals Cloudera and Hortonworks agreed to merge in a $
5.2 billion deal.
Both Rometty and Whitehurst, in comments to CNBC, agreed that Microsoft’s
purchase of GitHub was “irrelevant” to IBM and Red Hat’s decision to
enter into a deal.
While Red Hat has talked for years about potentially selling itself to other
companies, including Google, never has anything gotten nearly as serious as
the negotiations with IBM, according to people familiar with the matter.
“We were not looking to do something,” Whitehurst told CNBC.
IBM reported lighter-than-expected revenue in its most recent earnings
update, and its revenues shrank from the previous year after three quarters
of growth. Prior to that brief growth period, the company’s revenues had
been slowly declining for about five years.
The company has been working to catch up to Amazon and Microsoft in the
cloud infrastructure business.
Cloud is one of IBM’s four key strategic imperatives, or growth drivers --
the others are social, mobile and analytics -- and in the quarter, IBM
announced cloud deals with Economical Insurance, ExxonMobil and Novis.
IBM and Red Hat said the deal would enable businesses to do even more work
in the cloud, keeping their apps and data portable and secure, no matter
which cloud or hybrid technologies they adopt. | R*****i 发帖数: 2126 | 2 IBM这种过气的老几把,别说买小红帽,就是买了大灰狼也没几把球用。 | P*********k 发帖数: 160 | 3 叔剛好IBM和紅毛都待過,叔只能這麼說,這倆公司文化完全南轅北轍!!!咋融合呢
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