← Back to context

Comment by wereHamster

7 years ago

Is this event comparable to when Oracle bought Sun? Should we expect IBM to rip RH apart and alienate all existing customers?

16 comments

wereHamster

Reply
pinewurst  7 years ago

It's worse, IMHO. IBM treats their customers as prey just like Oracle plus they treat their own people worse. I know people who've had the IBM licensing ninja squad show up at their door for surprise validation with a big bill as a result.

  • KaiserPro  7 years ago

    I have extensive dealings with both.

    Oracle are actually malicious. IBM are just incompetent.

    If you can find a good account manager inside IBM for your needs, then there is a chance that you'll be able to get on well. Otherwise you'll have to do what I did which is say publicly shame the head of department on a public platform, with their superiors listening in.

    Oracle however, have no shame.

    • kazen44  7 years ago

      I seriously wonder who is still left at oracle who actually cares about technology and pushing it forward, instead of using it as a tool to squeeze money.

      Most competent Sun people have left oracle and are onto greener pastures.

      1 reply →

  • jjoonathan  7 years ago

    However nice their open source work is, RH licensing is already every bit as scummy as the others, at least if my coworkers in the department I used to work for are to be believed. Bait and switch freebies, "we need to run this sketchy shell script on your production system to determine how much money you owe us" nonsense, coming back with a ludicrously inaccurate bill that has to be argued over point-by-point with lawyers, the works.

  • tejtm  7 years ago

    When IBM bought Informix they replaced competent database support with aggressive DB2 marketing droids and presented us with an annual bill sixty times more than Informix had charged.

adventured  7 years ago

The alienate and destroy part is likely. Very different situations otherwise.

Sun was essentially a dead shell that still held a few valuable pieces when Oracle purchased them. Overall the business was in terminal decline.

Red Hat, while wildly overvalued (as many things are/were in this bubble market), has a consistently growing business that is on good footing overall.

Their prior four fiscal year sales figures: $1.7b, $2b, $2.4b, $2.9b

They look like they could do $3.4b in sales for fiscal 2019.

Their profitability is mildly lacking and combined with their modest growth doesn't come close to supporting their extreme valuation (much less when the stock was 50% higher). It's not surprising the board might sell the company here, the stock market bubble is likely nearing an end, with interest rates rising or a recession coming up next (either of which guarantee it's over). Red Hat may not see much higher than this market cap for another decade - assuming continued modest growth - if they were valued at a more sane level.

Red Hat is riding relatively high. Sun was on its last legs as an independent entity. Red Hat very clearly does not need to sell here, if they do it's simply the board taking what is an extraordinary price (would have to guess the deal will value them at 60 to 80 times idealized 2018 earnings).

  • zokier  7 years ago

    There is also the big difference that Sun was in the middle of transitioning to open source company (almost begrudgingly I think after everything else had failed), they weren't the great friend of open source they now are remembered as at their peak of their success. Sun still held significant amount of proprietary IP when they were acquired. In comparison RH has been open source from the get go, and pretty much everything they have is open source.