And here is a picture of Ben Lorica 罗瑞卡 interviewing Jay Kreps and other industry leaders at The Hive back on the evening of 25 February 2015. I believe they were talking about strategies for implementing Lambda Architecture.
All of which is to say: I have been a big fan of both companies for a long, long time. While today I am at employed at Redpanda Data, a direct competitor of Confluent, I hope to set aside any "team"-based bias to provide a sober and honest appraisal.
First, IBM has been shrinking. They were at 345,000 employees as of their 2020 Annual Report. But the COVID-19 pandemic was only one of many setbacks the company faced when Arvind Krishna took the helm as CEO. By December 2024 the employee base shrank to 270,000 — a drop of nearly 22%.
IBM revenue in 2020: $73.6B.
IBM revenue in 2024: $62.75B — a less-precipitous drop of 15%.
Revenue per employee over that period rose from $213k to $232k.
Confluent on its own? $400k.
And to compare: Amazon earns $580k per employee. Microsoft generates over $1M per. Nvidia? $4M-$5M.
And now, in November, they announced thousands of more layoffs. No one seems safe, regardless of job title. Those cut include positions in "artificial intelligence, marketing, software engineering and cloud technology."
Next, IBM has had a mixed record as a steward of acquisitions. Red Hat has doubled in revenues since their 2019 acquisition. For a while its headcount continued to grow, as much as 19,000 by 2023. But then it was forced into layoffs by parent IBM in April of that year, and then each year since, even while it remains one of the highest margin businesses in their portfolio.
SoftLayer — "IBM Cloud Classic" — also suffered significant layoffs in early 2025, with offshoring sending jobs to India.
DataStax had layoffs in 2023-2024, even before its acquisition was announced. Maybe they were "trimming the fat" to get into a shape to be acquired.
As a person with a long career in marketing, I know that many of the first roles to be jettisoned at a newly-acquired company tend to be in go-to-market organizations. Sales, Marketing, Developer Relations, Documentation, Training, Community, Customer Service. These tend to be seen as "nice to haves" by upper management. But their loss guts organizations and hollows out user-facing teams and open source communities.
My hope is that Confluent is spared as much of the pain and turmoil as possible. That, like Red Hat, it is run autonomously as much as possible.
[Crossposted from LinkedIn here, where you can see the photo mentioned: https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7404052...]