IBM has reached a definitive agreement to acquire Red Hat, the most prominent provider of open source cloud software in the world, for approximately $34 billion. The deal is the biggest Linux or open-source business deal ever, and the largest deal in IBM’s history, creating a new dynamic in the cloud wars between IBM, Google, Amazon and Microsoft.
The acquisition will enable organizations to securely move all of their business applications to the cloud. Due to the proprietary nature of today’s cloud market, 80 percent of business workloads have yet to move to the cloud, preventing portability of data and applications across multiple clouds.
