alt Hacker NewsIBM to acquire Confluent
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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.
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.
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.
“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.
Maybe a good time to consider alternatives https://www.redpanda.com/compare/redpanda-vs-kafka
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.
Kafka is already past it's prime time. Time for new solutions for the oldest problem - sending a message.
This is great news. Kafka (the messaging/streaming platform) has finally found its natural home.
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.
At least you can now safely buy into Kafka, as nobody ever got fired for buying IBM.
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
IBM was teabagging the Hasicorp booth at re:Invent with conspicuously old hardware set out like a museum piece. Ugh.
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!)
the price sounds a little bit high from a technical perspective
good for the founding team! Kafka is an enterprise bloat. most of the queueing solutions could be built with something much simpler
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?
And the enshittification treadmill continues. Great time to be a kafka alternative.
I'll start.
Another genius move from International Business Machines!
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?
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”.