Red Hat: Game Changer & Risky Flop

For connoisseurs and older generations, the memory of Léo Apotheker comes abruptly to mind. In his brief reign of sole control at SAP, he didn't dare spend a similar amount of money on a takeover - but he did at Hewlett-Packard:

As HP boss, he bought the British software company Autonomy for eleven billion US dollars. What a bad investment! To the poor pharmacist's credit, the direction was right: HP had to and still has to expand its range in the direction of further services and software offerings, see IBM.

IBM has been trying for many years to free itself from the mainframe tradition without declaring the mainframe bankrupt. A difficult undertaking, but one that has succeeded so far.

We also use mainframes and the price-performance ratio is amazingly good. Now IBM has been acquiring service providers and software companies for many years. This conglomerate of different cultures, technologies and markets leaves a mixed feeling.

IBM has not yet been able to score the big success, because Microsoft, Alibaba, AWS and Google are more agile and smarter. Even IBM's hopeful Watson is increasingly mutating into a damp squib. Or is Watson already dead?

However, Red Hat seems to me to be an exception, there is on the one hand the price of 34 billion US dollars and on the other hand the high number of 12,500 employees who now have to be "blue washed".

IBM has run a similarly important strategic acquisition into the ground before: Softlayer, as an IBM company, had a chance in 2013 to become a precursor to today's hyperscalers like AWS, Google and MS Azure.

The technological lead could not be transformed into market dominance. Now it should succeed with Red Hat and a broad open source offering as well as hybrid cloud.

In last November's cover story, Editor-in-Chief Färbinger tried to make "Hana on Power" and thus IBM look good.

And it is true: The combination of IBM Power hardware, Suse Linux and SAP Hana is more to be recommended than an Intel platform in the vast majority of cases.

And I think that combination will probably be the measure of any Hana performance for the next three years. The Power Processor is a Big Data machine.

No one has invested as much "love" in a Linux derivative for Hana as Suse. From the point of view of the SAP community, the combination of Suse and Hana could also be called a "dream team".

In order not to endanger the success of Suse Linux in general and the care for Hana including all teething problems and anomalies, Suse urgently needs a capital injection!

Suse won't stand a chance against the new open source dream team. IBM and Red Hat have the theoretical potential to redefine the open source scene for the B2B market: The goal will be less Linux market leadership than a very broad cloud and open source offering.

Suse is also trying to be more than "Linux". The order of the day and the alternative to the SAP multicloud concept is called hybrid cloud, which would enable IBM and Red Hat to score sustainable points against AWS, Google, Alibaba and Azure.

From the point of view of the SAP community and existing customers, the disadvantage of a hybrid cloud is that you are on the road in many disciplines: a hybrid concept means expertise in on-premise, your own data center, as well as on-demand (private, public and multicloud).

Whoever then starts to do something with the SAP Hana Cloud Platform will also have to pay for a license in the sense of "indirect" use. At least the technical and organizational side of hybrid operation will probably be better mastered by IBM and Red Hat than any other public cloud hyperscaler, including SAP.

Thus, a future hybrid cloud from IBM and Red Hat could become a "game changer", albeit with very high risk potential.