IBM have an absolutely stellar record of blowing acquisitions. The highly motivated newly acquired team will be in honeymoon phase for 3 months, and then it slowly dawns on them that they’ve joined an unbelievably rigid organization where things like customer satisfaction and great products don’t matter at all. Then they’ll be in shock and disbelief at the mind boggling Byzantine rules and internal systems they have to use, whose sole purpose is to make sure nobody does anything. Finally, the core IBM sales force will start to make demands on them and will short to ground any vestiges of energy, time, opportunity and motivation they might have left. The good team members will leave and join a former business partner, or decide to spend more time with the family. They’ll meet often at the beginning to relive the glory days of pre-acquisition and recount times where they went went above and beyond for that important early customer. But then these meetings will become fewer and fewer. Finally they’ll find a way of massaging their resumes to cast the last years as being “at the heart of AI infrastructure”.
Yeah, they acquired the company I worked at and left us alone for a year or two. Each year would get worse though, and each year we swapped nearly all bureaucratic things around. Always a different way to do performance reviews goals, etc.
A lot of the successful projects at the original company are now dead.
It's also weird being in IBM, because if your "contract" ends they put you on the bench. Then you basically have to job hunt within IBM, and if you can't find anything within a month or so you are out. It's super weird.
"It's also weird being in IBM, because if your "contract" ends they put you on the bench. Then you basically have to job hunt within IBM, and if you can't find anything within a month or so you are out. It's super weird."
This is standard operating procedure at most consulting/professional services firms.
Also the CIA
Sounds similar to university applied research arms too.
GTRI locally hires a lot of non-students to work in its various labs. Its labs then pitch ideas to private companies and the DoD. Sometimes they're solicited directly if the lab is well-known and has a track record of delivering good research-oriented results. They research and build prototypes around various capabilities: robotics, avionics, even classified stuff.
They're always pitching, because contracts end or fall through, and that's the source of everyone's payroll. The labs can even be competitive with one another, and the individual researchers might spend time split between labs.
Academics as a service.
I don’t know how many contracts IBM deals with, but the concept of a bench is very common in government contracting. It helps retain talent in an environment that’s more volatile than a typical office. Good for the company to avoid brain drain and hiring overhead, good for the employee because it’s a built-in safety net. Much better than your contract ending and immediately being out of a job, especially in today’s market
Surely by now everyone, including non-developers and non-software people, know exactly what IBM is, and you don't sell to IBM/join IBM without knowing exactly what's about to happen. No one joins IBM today and thinks there will be a huge focus on customer satisfaction or focus on great product design, it's all about squeezing maximum profit out of products until you need to discontinue them because you chased away all of the customers.
Not wrong but the image that people are painting in the comments is getting close to a caricature now.
The stuff IBM is doing on Quantum Computing is serious cutting-edge science and engineering for instance. The R&D they are doing on semiconductors on their 2nm and sub-2nm processes is also impressive and hardcore tech. They are doing a bunch of progress on post-quantum cryptography and homomorphic encryption. They've fallen behind now, but they were also quite strong on pre-LLM NLP for a couple of decades, it was not all fluff.
Yes they have an awful enterprise culture and they are not focused on building excellent products. But what they offer fits the needs of many organizations, and a lot of the things they are doing on R&D are no joke.
IBM shouldn't be thought of as a singular company. It is a conglomerate that does widely distinct things. Some enterprise boring profit squeezing, some shady scam "IBM blockchain on Z OS prevents viruses," some research/patent efforts elsewhere.
That said the GP is spot on for this sort of acquisition we know what will happen and has nothing to do with 2nm research division.
Doing research? Sure... Maybe. But it doesn't mean they are going to get anywhere to mass production... What was their last huge innovation? On top of that I won't give that much credit for what they do or say they do. Remember how much they lied about many of their "innovations" like IBM Watson?
> not focused on building excellent products
> a lot of the things they are doing on R&D are no joke
Sounds a _lot_ like Microsoft too...
Sounds a lot like every very large company, in broader terms
There were a series of Dilbert comics that spoke to this.
Dilbert’s company buys an “artsy” startup (represented by a chap with a goatee and a ponytail).
Dilbert comments something like “We get your energy and skill, and we provide … an endless supply of 3-ring binders.”
To which the chap replies “I hear that if your name goes into a binder, you lose your soul.”
> ...and internal systems they have to use, whose sole purpose is to make sure nobody does anything
Hasn't Notes been sluffed off to HCL?
Not OP, they have not tried to sell it to us... yet at least. They are still trying to convince us that MyCloud is a amazing product.
In defense of Byzantines. Their rules and amazing diplomatic prowess is what let them be an empire for so long. The negative connotations to Byzantine comes from the negative perception the west had of them. Byzantines were very practical in regards to who they allied with.
I'm sure the children who watched their parents get murdered before they themselves were taken into slavery during the fall of Constantinople appreciated those rules and the alliances they supported.
IBM is designed to milk every last bit of money from their clients. So they need to add new products every now and then to add new money flows.
I hope Hashicorp survives. A few higher ups I’ve talked to there made it seem like IBM wants to learn from them, not force their old ways onto Hashicorp. We’ll see. That one is still pretty new.
They tell that to every company they buy
They said the same thing about Red Hat. The fact that Whitehurst resigned from IBM should tell you something.
I'm pretty sure Jim had aspirations of being IBM CEO but they picked Arvind instead.
Judging from what my contacts say, I would not hold my breath. HCP is going to get smashed by bureaucracy and bigcorp bs just like all other IBM acquisitions. All you have to do to verify this is look at linkedin and track the departures of the the acquired staff.
HCP wasn't any prize when they got bought, though, right? HashiCorp Cloud was more like a fog in terms of growth. A bunch of products got lost a long the way (Boundary? Waypoint?) HCP lost 50% of its IPO value by the time it was bought. Yes, I know IPO's are high and always go down, but it went from around a $14bn valuation to being bought for something like $6.5bn.
Not to mention HashiCorp bled talent before the acquisition was even announced (BUSL started it) and it didn’t really stop as far as I’m aware.
I never quite figured out why IBM even bought them. Terraform? Wasn’t there an open source clone by that point?
Not to be cynical but that's said a lot in acquisitions by bigger companies to motivate some people to stay, but just doesn't seem to happen.
And even if there is a 20% of executives actually believe in "We should learn from HashiCorp", usually not even that is enough to counter-act the default mode of operation which is squeezing customers. GLHF to remaining HashiCorp believers, but personally I'd try to find alternatives for the software you use from them if you haven't already.
Executives will say anything to boost the next quarter results. After that they get rebooted and start again, and nothing they said before counts for anything.
Usually the internal stakeholder that made the case to acquire the business leaves/gets promoted and new managers come in and start the assimilation process.
And in two years, the acquired management team all leaves like clockwork because they got their retention bonus.
My friends at RedHat were embracing similar forms of copium. By now they've all either moved on or are actively hand sitting while exploring options.
> They’ll meet often at the beginning to relive the glory days of pre-acquisition and recount times where they went went above and beyond for that important early customer.
Yeesh. Which level of hell is that?
I've heard IBM is really just an external government agency. If you look at it through the lens of being acquired by a government bureaucracy, then your explanation makes perfect sense. IBM is too entrenched to fail and too poorly run to be acquired.
I had friends that worked at a high-profile IBM acquisition a decade ago and this is exactly what happened.
Pretty bleak, and describes my experience to a T (although involving other companies). Has there ever been an example where a company has been acquired and culture/morale/conditions have actually improved rather than dissolved?
The Apple acquisition of NeXT has (only half-jokingly) been described as NeXT buying Apple with Apple's money. That's obviously an exceptionally rare case.
I wouldn't describe it as improved necessarily, but successfully integrated. This happened many times - youtube by google for example. Facebook acquisitions are pretty successful too (not looking if it was good for humanity, just from business perspective).
Some companies like Amazon buy companies and let them run almost independently - IMDB for example, Zappos, Twitch, Whole Foods, Zoox, Audible.
Android was also an acquistion by Google, run relatively separately, and it grew into something huge
Uh weird that I got downvotes
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Android_(operating_system)#His...
Android Inc. was founded in Palo Alto, California, in October 2003 by Andy Rubin and Chris White
Google acquired the company in July of [2005] for at least $50 million
It was ad-supported of course, but it's definitely not similar to IBM acquisitions
IBM isn’t really a tech company anymore. More of a legal trolling company that cosplays as tech.
They seem to primarily benefit from kickbacks in the form of both leasing and technical contracts for things like opening offices in a location for tax benefits or to promote local economy.
Then they see how far they can cut back their end of the contract after the first few months (e.g. Maybe we agreed to have 500 employees in an office, but since nobody is allowed in, we think we can get away with 100 employees.) Then this turns into trolling about how the contract never defines what in office means so can we offshore… Too much undefined confusion, so I guess we get to break the contract but keep what the mayor paid us… Then they just shut down the office and move on to the next location.
It seems like the local government must be in on these schemes for leasing. Otherwise this wouldn’t be going on for decades as it has been.
The other part of business, technical contracts, is similar except instead of leasing it’s providing some sort of infrastructure coverage for something big. It starts off with good faith fulfilling the contract. Then a few months later it’s like well we have a US military contract that demands US employees but US employees are too expensive. What if we offshore but all the traffic is technically going through a single US employee’s computer which is what the contract technically demands.
Then it turns into well we have offshore people working on this anyway, why not just give them direct access and we’ll have a US person overseeing them. Lay everyone else off.
Then they see how long they can get away with this until someone gets mad. Then they take one step back to see how close to the technical contract they can get while threatening to abandon the whole thing at the same time.
Along with this sort of atmosphere and attitude for the law, it seems we see them constantly doing everything possible to constantly fire old people or anyone else that has legally protected status. So you’ll get statistical analytics on ways to fire protected people based around the constant performance reviews with statistics being used to see how close groups of protected people can be removed without statistically breaking the law. Whatever that algorithm is.
That plays into just straight up cutting people, but it also goes into a lot of other subsystems of skirting the law, like if old people can’t relocate as easily then hopping offices and forcing people to relocate 5000 miles is a way they can be eliminated. Part of this might be moving people onto new teams and then saying that team has to be in office for some made up reason, and then firing them for not relocating or using some made up metric like badging timestamps to get them, or some other technicality like leaving for lunch 5 minutes early despite being a salaried employee which is reported as hourly because of tax trolling.
I don’t know how IBM still exists because from my perspective it’s pretty clear they’re breaking or at best on razor thin gray line on ice on just about every possible law you could break.
That's a very cynical take. Unfortunately likely correct.
It's a fact that a publicly traded company is beholden to Wall Street and any time such a company would use their earnings for R&D the P/E and margins go down (i.e. spending more money to earn the same) and this is considered a negative signal at Wall Street and the company gets punished in the market.
So the only way a company can spend their earnings is to pay dividends or buy assets such as other companies, which then must be squeezed for margins.
More here:
https://www.cringely.com/2015/06/03/autodesks-john-walker-ex...
I worked for IBM Cloud about 6+ years ago. While there, we had to connect to a Softlayer VPN to get into our Jira instance. My VPN account and Jira account never got provisioned so I couldn't connect nor see the Jira board. My team-mates couldn't even assign a ticket to me b/c of this. They would just put my initial's in the ticket summary and send me a slack of the details.
It was right before I left that we got our own Jira instance. This was all around the time of the Red Hat acquisition. I remember the announcement b/c we used SuSE for everything IIRC.
Why didn't you ask to get the accounts provisioned?
I work for a company that has so much bureaucracy and silos that teams maintain wiki pages with links and routing on how to create tickets for specific tasks and wether there is a specific mandatory information needed in order to not have your ticket just closed as incomplete without an explanation.
Sometimes a team unilaterally decide to change the process, info is sent to a random number of mailbox/managers who may fail to pass the info. Some entire teams just put themselves in away status 24/7 and do not respond to direct messages.
So yes I can believe his story. Sometimes in these kind of companies you just don't know who and how to ask for something and you just hope someone knows someone who might know.
What's the largest company you've worked for? A lot of big, older companies, are just so messed up that its just not worth it. How do you do this? Well you have to find the specific form, or specific person who does the thing, who is that? no one knows. So that provisioning of a vpn and getting in jira might literally be like a month of work.
I've worked for S&P Global, so pretty large. If you don't have an account that you need, then you need to be tenacious, which of course is super annoying. If you don't have an account on a system you should, it's 100% on you after a while.
On consulting engagements, 0% of the time are Jira and git provisioned correctly for an outside consultant. I used to be appalled at being paid for two or three days of waiting for the IT guy to fix this. Now I use the time to find cleaning supplies and deep clean my cubicle and chair. People do look at me funny, but I feel better not just sitting there reading.
I imagine that's done via JIRA tcket/IT before onboarding.
So if they somehow can get past initial device deployment/user account logon, and get other resources IE; slack....well that speaks to how difficult/pointless it would be to get proper VPN/Jira access.
You'd have to be able to find the person to do that first hehe!
This is so fascinating to me. I mean how IBM keeps taking over other companies, but they consistently deliver low quality/bottom-tier services and products. Why do they keep doing the same thing again and again? How are they generating actual revenue this way?
Ok, so does anyone remember 'Watson'? It was the chatgpt before chatgpt. they built it in house. Why didn't they compete with OpenAI like Google and Anthropic are doing, with in-house tools? They have a mature PowerPC (Power9+? now?)setup, lots of talent to make ML/LLMs work and lots of existing investment in datacenters and getting GPU-intense workloads going.
I don't disagree that this acquisition is good strategy, I'm just fascinated (Schadenfreude?) to witness the demise of confluent now. I think economists should study this, it might help avert larger problems.
Why in the world would economists need to study this? It's been known that large bureaucracies have been dysfunctional for over a couple of decades now if not centuries. The large reason is because 1) the incentives to do great work are not there (most of the credit for a huge company's success goes to the CEO who gets 100X the salary of a regular worker while delivering usually pretty much nothing) 2) politics usually plays a huge role which gives a huge advantage to your competition (i.e. your competition needs to spend less time on politics and more time on the actual product) and 3) human beings don't functionally work well in groups larger than 100-250 due to the overwhelming complexity of the communication needed in order to make this type of structure work. Incentives though I think are the primary driver - most people at companies like IBM don't have any incentives to actually care about the product they produce and that's the secret behind the ruin of almost every large company.
Edit: you also seem to be giving too much credence to Watson. Watson was actually mostly a marketing tool designed to win in Jeopardy and nothing else. It was constructed specifically to compete in that use-case and was nowhere near to the architecture of a general transformer which is capable of figuring out meta-patterns within language and structurally understanding language. You can read about Watson's design and architecture here if you're curious: https://www.cs.cornell.edu/courses/cs4740/2011sp/papers/AIMa...
> most of the credit for a huge company's success goes to the CEO who gets 100X the salary of a regular worker while delivering usually pretty much nothing
Well, in Confluent's case I'm not so sure that's true given that their CEO is also the company founder as well as one of the original authors of Apache Kafka.
Everything will make sense when you realize that IBM is a consulting company. They don't care about building great products. In fact building self-serve products will directly take away from their consulting revenue. They instead need to be good at marketing and selling their services. Watson was exactly that - a marketing demo that got them in the news cycle and helped them sell a giant wave of contracts under a single brand to unsuspecting CIOs of legacy non-tech companies. Every acquisition helps with this goal. Red Hat - locking companies into licenses and support contracts for the OS. HashiCorp & Confluent - locking companies into support contracts for their cloud infra.
The service part you are likely referring to is now Kyldryl, a separate company. IBM now focus on software and cloud. There are still services but are much less prominent.
>Why do they keep doing the same thing again and again? How are they generating actual revenue this way?
IBM has a ton of Enterprise software, backed by a bunch of consultants hiding in boring businesses/governments.
They also do a ton of outsourcing work where they will be big enterprise IT support desk and various other functions. In fact, that side has gotten so big, IBM now has more employees in India in then any other country.
Your fascination seems hinged on the fact that IBM has "lots of talent to make ML/LLMs work" which judging by what they've put out so far and talk publicly about, is very far from the truth. Anyone who has a clue seems to (rightly) have left IBM decades ago, and left are business people who think "Managed to increase margin by 0.1%" is something to celebrate.
To be a bit more candid, they have lots of employees outside of the US (particularly in India). and both in the US and elsewhere, people need to eat. They may not have the talent to innovate new tech like OpenAI and others, or do cutting-edge R&D, but they certainly have the talent to take LLM breakthroughs and adapt. They could have competed with many of the B-Tier LLM services out there with the right leadership.
> but they certainly have the talent to take LLM breakthroughs and adapt
I'll believe that when I see it. They had a decade headstart with all of this, and yeah, could have been at the forefront. But they're not, and because of the organization itself, they're unlikely to have a shot at even getting close to there. Seems they know this themselves too, as they're targeting the lower end of the market now with their Granite models, rather than shooting for the stars and missing, like they've done countless of times before.
It’s a shame because people forget how good IBM research was back in the day. I do wonder if they still have great people in those r&d labs, or if they all left.
There are good people in IBM. But they don't have the resources behind them anymore. Look at the market cap of ms, Amazon. Google, meta et al, compared to IBM.
> Ok, so does anyone remember 'Watson'? It was the chatgpt before chatgpt. they built it in house
I do. I remember going to a chat once where they wanted to get people on-board in using it. It was 90 minutes of hot air. They "showed" how Watson worked and how to implement things, and I think every single person in the room knew they were full of it. Imagine we were all engineers and there were no questions at the end.
Comparing Watson to LLMs is like comparing a rock to an AIM-9 Sidewinder.
Watson was nothing like ChatGPT. The first iteration was a system specifically built to play Jeopardy. It did some neat stuff with NLP and information retrieval, but it was all still last generation AI/ML technology. It then evolved into a brand that IBM used to sell its consulting services. The product itself was a massive failure because it had no real applications and was too weak as a general purpose chat bot.
If anyone is curious to see what Watson actually was you can find it here (it was nowhere near to a generalized large langue model -- mostly made for winning in Jeopardy): https://www.cs.cornell.edu/courses/cs4740/2011sp/papers/AIMa...
They gave up on watson about 18 months before llm's popped up, and they have simply just not got enough cash on hand to compete. While the big boys grew fantastically bigger over the past 15 years as cloud happened ibm fumbled time after time and shrank ever smaller, and is now desperately hoping it can stay relevant. but in the end they just haven't got the resources to compete on that stage anymore.
The recent interview with Arvind had the “grapes are too green, anyway” energy. They missed the train because they were licking their Watson wounds. Then sorta regretted it but it’s too late.
Same thing happened with their cloud offering. They laughed at AWS, then tried to catch up, then missed and pivoted to “hybrid” (cloud and local).
> Ok, so does anyone remember 'Watson'? It was the chatgpt before chatgpt. they built it in house. Why didn't they compete with OpenAI like Google and Anthropic are doing, with in-house tools?
Leadership in IBM also thought that Watson was like what what OAI/Anthropic/Google are doing now. It wasn't. Watson was essentially a ML pipeline over-optimized on Jeopardy, which is why it failed in literally every other domain.
Outside of Jeopardy, Watson was just a brand.
Sure, but they were doing that stuff. They had ML people, infrastructure, marketing, branding,etc... already. Their product sucked, but they could have copy-catted OpenAI in 2022+ like everyone else.
To add to that i think their R&D labs along with HPE were one of the few to innovate on the memristor and actually build some fascinating concept machines.If i rememeber HPE's was 'The Machine'.
Athough i think they just di/dont know how to adapt these to market that isnt a enterprise behemoth , rather than develop/price it so more devs can take a hold and experiment.
There are entire niches of us that make a living (not at IBM) making certain IBM products actually do what they're supposed to. From my vantage point I see essentially zero maintenance going on with their products. I sincerely don't understand the market (why do people keep paying hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars for non-existent support?) - but whatever.
I’m pretty convinced there is a bell curve of “understanding what IBM does” where idiots and geniuses both have absolutely no idea.
It really is probably that strangest company in tech which you think could be mysterious and intriguing. But no one cares. It’s like no one wants to look behind the boring suit and see wtf. From my low point on that bell curve I can’t see how they are even solvent.
Genuine question: how did the IBM acquisitions of Red Hat and HashiCorp turn out?
For Red Hat, there's no longer an official "public" distribution of RHEL, but apart from that they seemingly have been left alone and able to continue to develop their own products. But that's only my POV as a user of OSS Red Hat products at home and of RHEL and OpenShift at work.
We moved off HashiCorp's Terraform Cloud when they tried to hike the price 100x on us, although that was technically pre-acquisition I think (it was their move to resource-based pricing). In talking with our account manager, they basically said they only really cared about enterprise accounts, and that migrating away would probably make sense for us.
HashiCorp also changed their licenses to non-open-source licenses, but again I think this was technically pre-acquisition (I think as they were gearing up to be a more attractive target for an exit).
In addition to this, I’ve noticed that OpenTofu is gaining much more interesting features and are actually acting upon long-requested functionality that HashiCorp has refused to implement (example: provider for_each in 1.9.0)
> (I think as they were gearing up to be a more attractive target for an exit).
A common conspiracy theory, but not true.
Source: the guy the company was named after
> were gearing up to be a more attractive target for an exit
An "exit" from the public market?
Yes. They were burning the cash they raised from IPO as weren't profitable and no real path to profitability. Needed to find a buyer to take private as the other option - raise debt or print shares - wasn't going to happen as the share price had massively tanked and wasn't going to go up any time soon.
Hopefully mitchellh will write a book about Hashicorp some time. Would be fascinating to read the inside take.
The argument has been made that the real value of RH lies in the people working there. And if IBM were to interfere too heavy-handedly, those people would just leave, and RH would become basically worthless.
Maybe that's how it should work, but it's not how it actually works.
The culture makes the company. Everyone on the lower rungs of the org chart knows this, because it's what they live and breathe every day. A positive, supportive workplace culture with clear goals and relative autonomy is a thing of beauty. You routinely find people doing more work than they really have to because they believe in the mission, or their peers, or the work is just fun. People join the company (and stay) because they WANT to not because they have to.
Past a certain company size, upper management NEVER sees this. They are always looking outward: strategy, customers, marketing, competition. Never in. They've been trained to give great motivational speeches that instill a sense of company pride and motivation for about 30 seconds. After that, employee morale is HR's job.
I have worked in a company that got acquired while it was profitable. The culture change was slow but dramatic. We went from a fun, dynamic culture with lots of teamwork and supportive management, to one step or two above Office Space. As far as the acquiring company was concerned, everything we were doing didn't matter, even if it worked. We had to conform to their systems and processes, or find new jobs. Most of us eventually did the latter.
Somehow Red Hat seems to be a notable exception. Although IBM owns Red Hat, they seem to have mostly left it alone instead of absorbing it. The name "IBM" doesn't even appear on redhat.com. Because I'm an outsider, I can't say whether IBM meddled in Red Hat's HR or management, but I would guess not.
Well, there is CentOS Stream:
https://www.centos.org/centos-stream/
And Fedora is still the upstream of RHEL, nothing changed there.
It seems like most users got tired of the unknowns with CentOS and went to Alma/Rocky. Doesn't help that most third party software vendors also didn't bother to support it.
I migrated our company off Terraform to Pulumi as a direct result of the acquisition.
How has it been? Sincere question.
Gnome has stagnated significantly.
I'm not sure this is bad? It's still maintained, and it isn't like there are frequent revolutions in UI design - if it works, it works.
Slow and boring is a pretty nice place to be.
The Gnome desktop that shipped with Solaris over two decades ago is just as useful, possibly more useful, as the tablet-oriented hamburger menu UI of today.
Yes, two decades: https://adtmag.com/articles/2003/08/04/solaris-gets-a-gnome-...
If only it had stagnated around gnome 2.0.
>> Gnome has stagnated significantly.
GTK is still alive. It seems like Cosmic desktop with GTK apps will be a reasonable path forward. Of course there's KDE and QT, but I mean as an alternative to those.
Could that be due to increased popularity of KDE?
Linux on the desktop isn't a lucrative business
“With the acquisition of Confluent, IBM will provide the smart data platform for enterprise IT, purpose-built for AI.”
https://newsroom.ibm.com/2025-12-08-ibm-to-acquire-confluent...
I don't understand how this acquisition is relevant for AI.
Every time an executive says AI the number goes up.
Event-driven AI decision making is the C-suite wet dream. A large % of major orgs run Kafka for their eventing systems.
So the idea is sorta watching the wire of streaming data with autonomous agents or something like that?
Exactly. An agent may be acting on the contents of individual events, but also spotting trends and patterns in events, and intervening where needed/instructed.
Anything today has to contain the word "AI" otherwise it simply won't be considered.
As I read the release, it just sounded like "something something something data, something something something AI."
AI is just the lastest buzzword. Everyone has it, because they have to. Don't look behind the curtain.
You can double your company's value by saying it's an AI company. Easiest, simplest way to create value.
They probably have cursor licenses
Streaming, EDA can solve lot of data challenges for enterprise AI use cases
AI Agent for Kafka Consumer group
/s
It's like how lots of species evolve into crabs, or crab like things. Instead of dying out evolutionarily, failed giants like IBM evolve into Computer Associates.
Maybe a good time to consider alternatives https://www.redpanda.com/compare/redpanda-vs-kafka
I led the engineering team of a large adtech company (TripleLift - order of hundreds of billions of events/day) and we evolved from self hosting Kafka, to paying a vendor (Instacluster), to migrating to RedPanda.
RedPanda was a huge win for us. Confluent never made sense to us since we were always so cost conscious but the complexity/risk of managing a critical part of our infra was always something I worried about. RedPanda was able to handle both for us - cheaper than Kafka hosting vendors with significantly better performance. We were pretty early customers but was a huge win for us.
We switched to Redpanda's BYOC product because we couldn't use Confluent Cloud (contractual reasons) and BYOC was a third the price of Confluent for Kubernetes while also being a managed service.
I've been pretty happy with RP performance/cost/functionality wise. It isn't Kafka though, it's a proprietary C++ rewrite that aims for 100% compatibility. This hasn't been an issue in the 2+ years since we migrated prod, but YMMV.
Maybe this whole thing it's because Snowflake acquired redpanda earlier this year: https://www.investors.com/news/technology/snowflake-stock-re...
Snowflake did not acquire RP after all.
Kafka is already past it's prime time. Time for new solutions for the oldest problem - sending a message.
I'm still convinced the vast majority of kafka implementations could be replaced with `SELECT * FROM mytable ORDER BY timestamp ASC`
pull vs push. Plus if you start storing the last timestamp so you only select the delta and if you start sharding your db and dealing with complexities of having different time on different tables/replication issues it quickly becomes evident that Kafka is better in this regard.
But yeah, for a lot of implementations you don't need streaming. But for pull based apps you design your architecture differently, some things are a lot easier than it is with DB, some things are harder.
Funny you mention that, because Kafka consumers actually pull messages.
That is exactly what I am doing with sqlite.
Have a table level seqno as monotonically increasing number stamped for every mutation. When a subscriber connects it asks for rows > Subscriber's seqno-last-handled.
Sure, if you're working on a small homelab with minimal to no processing volume.
The second you approach any kind of scale, this falls apart and/or you end up with a more expensive and worse version of Kafka.
I think there is a wide spectrum between small-homelab and google scale.
I was surprised how far sqlite goes with some sharding on modern SSDs for those in-between scale services/saas
What you're doing is fine for a homelab, or learning. But barring any very specific reason other than just not liking Kafka, its bad. The second that pattern needs to be fanned out to support even 50+ producers/consumers, the overhead and complexity needed to manage already-solved problems becomes a very bad design choice.
Kafka already solves this problem and gives me message durability, near infinite scale out, sharding, delivery guarantees, etc out of the box. I do not care to develop, reshard databases or production-alize this myself.
Some people don't and won't need 50+ producers/consumers for a long while, if ever. Rewriting the code at that point may be less costly than operating Kafka in the interim. Kafka is also has a higher potential for failure than sqlite.
sqlite can do 40,000 transactions per second, that's going to be a lot more than 'homelab' (home lab).
Not everything needs to be big and complicated.
"Any kind of scale" No, there's a long way of better and more straightforward solutions than the simple SELECT
(SELECT * from EVENTS where TIMESTAMP > LAST_TS LIMIT 50) for example
Nothing wrong with Kafka. Time to build better abstractions on top of Kafka.
ATProto? (aka AT protocol, ATP, Atmosphere...)
Erlang/OTP!
What are the alternatives?
RedPanda, Iggy, Pulsar, Fluvio, NATS, etc.
wait what do you mean? what's wrong with kafka?
At least you can now safely buy into Kafka, as nobody ever got fired for buying IBM.
This isn't the old times, you can expect the opposite outcome these days.
OP IMHO was obviously being sarcastic.
Fair.
I know companies who would certainly have fired people for buying IBM, if they could have gone back in time to do so.
This is great news. Kafka (the messaging/streaming platform) has finally found its natural home.
ibm also acquired datastax (managed pulsar) this year. building on top of these specialized managed service providers is becoming increasingly risky. at this point i'd rather use one of the kneecapped cloud provider offerings if possible (azure event hubs / aws msk / etc.) than risk being extorted in a few years as the result of some acquisition. at least you can work around the limitations..
anyone have an idea on how streamnative is doing? we're considering them for managed pulsar and unfortunately nobody else is in the game
And two years prior IBM acquired Ahana (PrestoDB SaaS). Totally agree that businesses need to much more carefully assess the risks of moving to these hosted open source platforms. Reminds me of when over a decade ago companies moved to Snowflake for their DWs because "our Teradata costs are out of control".
IBM is buying market share, not a surprise; at least one telecom has all their Kafka stuff on the Confluent cloud, and there must be 1000s of such customers.
IBM was teabagging the Hasicorp booth at re:Invent with conspicuously old hardware set out like a museum piece. Ugh.
the price sounds a little bit high from a technical perspective
Let the Bluewashing begin. Everything will be WebSphere-first and then WebSphere-only.
If Apache Foundation is where open source projects go to die (a bit unfair though), IBM is the equivalent for for-profit companies.
How is this different from Apache Qpid or RabbitMQ or IBM MQ (at least the first and third of those is already owned by IBM!)
good for the founding team! Kafka is an enterprise bloat. most of the queueing solutions could be built with something much simpler
is it good or bad for confluent employees?
IBM paid a ~30% premium on the current stock price, so all shareholders (I imagine employees own a bunch of shares) will get a decent chunk of cash.
Some redundant departments (HR, finance, accounting and the like) will be downsized after the acquisition.
Engineering and product will be unaffected in the short term, but in a year or two the IBM culture will start to seep in, and that would be a good time for tenured employees to start planning their exits. That's also when lock-up agreements will expire and the existing leadership of Confluent will depart and be replaced by IBM execs.
And sales teams will likely be forced to cross-sell IBM Products.
It depends a lot on which org they go into, and the motivations of the P&L owner of that division.
IBM is a really big and diverse company, in a way fundamentally different from most other big tech. In a sense, it is completely incoherent to refer to them as a singular entity.
My opinions are my own. I worked at IBM like a decade ago in a role where I could see the radically different motivations of divisions.
From experience, and to slightly refute the sibling replied, good for the confluent peeps that get flagged as being essential to the acquisition, they'll get a retention bonus of 100-300% of base pay spread over three years. The cutting of staff will begin likely in the 3-5 year time frame.
IPO'd at 45, high of 90ish, sold at 30. It depends on the strike price for employees, but its not clear if its universally a good outcome.
Both.
IBM will likely give Confluent employees a large pay package, and then let them go after the merger.
They will get some money in the short term, but they better start looking for another job
edit: btw, it's typical for any acquisition/merger
Some market reaction
Confluent stock soars 29% as IBM announces $11B acquisition deal
https://www.cnbc.com/2025/12/08/ibm-confluent-deal-data.html
This is so funny. Now CNBC says "...The addition of Confluence will strengthen IBM’s artificial intelligence portfolio..."
Since when is streaming event logs AI? Am I taking crazy pills?
Near-Real-time inference is a hot thing these days with Apache Flink, which is commercially supported by Confluent (not Confluence)
Another genius move from International Business Machines!
And the enshittification treadmill continues. Great time to be a kafka alternative.
I'll start.
Redpanda has been a superior wire-compatible alternative to Kafka for years.
Until Redpanda becomes enshittified.
Sigh.
Not a drop in replacement, but worth looking at.
Apache Iggy seems like a project with a lot of momentum: https://github.com/apache/iggy
`SELECT * FROM mytable ORDER BY timestamp ASC`
Ah yes, and every consumer should just do this in a while (true) loop as producers write to it. Very efficient and simple with no possibility of lock contention or hot spots. Genius, really.
I've implemented a distributed worker system on top of this paradigm.
I used ZMQ to connect nodes and the worker nodes would connect to an indexer/coordinator node that effectively did a `SELECT FROM ORDER BY ASC`.
It's easier than you may think and the bits here ended up with probably < 1000 SLOC all told.
- Coordinator node ingests from a SQL table
- There is a discriminator key for each row in the table for ordering by stacking into an in-memory list-of-lists
- Worker nodes are started with _n_ threads
- Each thread sends a "ready" message to the coordinator and coordinator replies with a "work" message
- On each cycle, the coordinator advances the pointer on the list, locks the list, and marks the first item in the child list as "pending"
- When worker thread finishes, it sends a "completed" message to the coordinator and coordinator replies with another "work" message
- Coordinator unlocks the list the work item originated from and dequeues the finished item.
- When it reaches the end of the list, it cycles to the beginning of the list and starts over, skipping over any child lists marked as locked (has a pending work item)
Dead simple design, extremely robust, very high throughput, very easy to scale workers both horizontally (more nodes) and vertically (more threads). ZMQ made it easy to connect the remote threads to the centralized coordinator. It was effectively "self balancing" because the workers would only re-queue their thread once it finished work. Very easy to manage, but did not have hot failovers since we kept the materialized, "2D" work queue in memory. Though very rarely did we have issues with this.
Yeah, but that's like doing actual engineering. Instead you should just point to Kafka and say that it's going to make your horrible architecture scale magically. That's how the pros do it.
Kafka isn't magic, but it's close. If a single-node solution like an SQL database can handle your load then why shouldn't you stick with SQL? Kafka is not for you. Kafka is for workloads that would DDoS Postgres.
It's one of my favorite patterns, because it's the highest-impact, lowest-hanging fruit to fix in many systems that have hit serious scaling bottlenecks.
wait what's wrong with kafka?
I was in the midst of writing a snarky reply and then realized my actual issue with Kafka is that people reach for it way too often and use it in ways that don't really make sense.
Kind of like how people use docker for evrything, when what you really should be doing is learn how to package software.
Ops here, Docker is packaging software.
Agree on the Kafka thing though. I've seen so many devs trip over Kafka topics, partitions and offsets when their throughput is low enough that RabbitMQ would do fine.
No, docker is a software for packaging systems.
The people distributing software should shut them damn up about how the rest of the system it runs in is configured. (But not you, your job is packaging full systems.)
That said, it seems to me that this is becoming less of a problem.
What's wrong with kafka or what WILL BE wrong with kafka?
Nothing inherently wrong with the core product IMHO. The issue is more with Confluent, who have been constantly swinging from hot buzzword to hot buzzword for the last few years in search of growth. Confluent cloud is very expensive, and you still have to deal with a surprising amount of scaling headaches. I have people I consider friends that work there, so I don't want to go too deep into their various missteps, but the Kafka ecosystem has been largely stagnant outside of getting rid of Zookeeper and simplifying operations/deployment. There have been some decent quality of life fixes, but the platform is very expensive, yet if you are really all-in on Kafka, you would be insane to not get support from Confluent- it can break in surprising ways.
So you are stuck with some really terrible tradeoffs- Go with Confluent Cloud, pay a fortune, and still likely have some issues to deal with. Or you could go with Confluent Platform, still have to pay people to operate it, while Confluent the company focuses most of their attention on Cloud and still charges you a fortune. Or you could just go completely OS and forgo anything Confluent and risk being really up the river when something inevitably breaks, or you have to learn the hard way that librdkafka has poor support for a lot of the shiny features discussed in the release notes.
Redpanda has surpassed them from a technical quality perspective, but Kafka has them beat on the ecosystem and the sheer inertia of moving from one platform to another. Kafka for example was built in a time of spinning rust hard disks, and expects to be run on general purpose compute nodes, where Redpanda will actually look at your hardware and optimize the number of threads its spawns for the box it is on- assuming it is going to be the only real app running there, which is true for anything but a toy deployment.
This is my experience from running platform teams and being head of messaging at multiple companies.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification is helpful if you arent aware of how late stage capitalism works
Late stage of what?
How is IBM still alive? Or is it trying to prove the same
Could anyone please explain what IBM is even doing these days? Where revenue is coming from?
it's a public company, read the quarterly reports