IBM to acquire Confluent

It depends a lot on which org they go into, and the motivations of the P&L owner of that division.

IBM is a really big and diverse company, in a way fundamentally different from most other big tech. In a sense, it is completely incoherent to refer to them as a singular entity.

My opinions are my own. I worked at IBM like a decade ago in a role where I could see the radically different motivations of divisions.