IBM’s $34 billion deal for Red Hat may have taken mere months to close, but the cultural journey it’s kicking off will take a decade to realize. If that seems too long, in part it is, given the monumental industry changes in how IT is consumed. No vendor wants to get last place in that race.
It’s also true that public cloud spending remains a Lilliputian percentage of overall IT spending, estimated by Gartner at $3.7 trillion in 2018. Enterprises desperately need help navigating their on-premises present with their cloud future. In this market, Red Hat/IBM has a real opportunity to win big.