IBM buys Red Hat. The corporation will pay 34 billion dollars for the developer of programs based on Linux

On October 28, IBM Corporation announced the purchase of Red Hat - an open code software developer based on the Linux operating system. IBM will pay 34 billion dollars for Red Hat, having bought all the shares of the company at a price of 190 dollars apiece (although their market value before closing the exchange trading last week was $ 117). The transaction will be closed in mid -2019. Red Hat will become a separate unit in IBM.

Red Hat was created in 1993. At first, she was known for her free Red Hat Linux distribution . In the early 2000s, the company stopped supporting it and began to develop the Red Hat Enterprise Linux distribution and other solutions intended for corporate customers and sold by subscription. In addition, Red Hat supports Fedora - a free operating system based on Linux. The user community is engaged in its development, but the company sponsor the project and uses Fedora as a test site for its commercial products.

Red Hat in 2012 became the world's first open code developer, whose income exceeded a billion dollars. In 2017, he reached almost three billion dollars. Over the past five years, the company's shares have grown by 170%. IBM things go worse than Red Hat - over the same period, the cost of a corporation has decreased by almost a third. One of the most noticeable IBM projects of recent years is the Watson supercomputer with artificial intelligence, which in 2011 won the Jeopardy Textor! (Her Russian counterpart - “its own game”). A few years later, IBM gave customers to her cloud platform access to Watson capabilities.

Red Hat specializes in solutions in the field of cloud technologies, where the Linux operating system is widely used. This is interested in IBM, which considers them one of the key areas of its development. The corporation hopes that by buying Red Hat will ahead of competitors from Amazon, Google and Microsoft and will become a world leader in the cloud technology market. “The acquisition of Red Hat will change the rules of the game,” said the head of the board of directors and IBM President Ginny Rometti.

Earlier, IBM has already concluded several large transactions to gain a foothold in the cloud technology market - in particular, in 2013 I bought Softlayer provider for two billion dollars. The transaction from Red Hat has become the largest in the history of IBM and the third in the list of the largest in the world technological market.

Olga Korelina