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IBM to acquire Confluent

(www.confluent.io)
443 points abd12 | 1 comments | 08 Dec 25 13:43 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
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npalli ◴[09 Dec 25 00:55 UTC] No.46199974[source]▶
Confluent was trading at less than 50% of its IPO price when IBM made the offer. The stock and the company has been going sideways for several years now, keeps growing revenues but loses even more as most of it is in Sales and Marketing. In which world is this seen as some sort of extraordinary company that will get sabotaged by IBM. Seems Confluent management knows the writing on the wall, IBM will clean up (fire a bunch of sales and management guys) and make this a workable business. It will seem brutal for some Confluent guys but that's because their business is broken; and only someone from outside can come in and fix it as the current senior management cannot.

IBM has been around for over a hundred years, maybe they know a thing or two about running a software business :-)

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abraae ◴[09 Dec 25 04:08 UTC] No.46201128[source]▶
I joined IBM over 40 years ago, like my pappy before me.

My main takeaway from IBM's longevity is just how astonishingly long big companys' death rattles can be, not how great IBM are at running software businesses.

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dpark ◴[09 Dec 25 05:33 UTC] No.46201586[source]▶
Are they dying? IBM’s stock is up 160% over the past 5 years.
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ChuckMcM ◴[09 Dec 25 05:57 UTC] No.46201727[source]▶
No. They are a multi-generational institution at this point and they are constantly evolving. If you work there it definitely FEELS like they are dying because the thing you spent the last 10 years of your career on is going away and was once heralded as the "next big thing." That said, IBM fascinated me when I was acquired by them because it is like a living organism. Hard to kill, fully enmeshed in both the business and political fabric of things and so ultimately able to sustain market shifts.
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abraae ◴[09 Dec 25 07:42 UTC] No.46202309[source]▶
That's an interesting and enlightening way to look at it.

For me it was the death of IBM's preeminence in IT. When I started there a job at IBM was prestigious,a job for life. More than once I was told that we had a lengthy backlog of inventions and technological wonders that could be wheeled out of the plant if competitors ever nipped too closely at IBM's heels.

At that time IBM had never made a single person redundant - anywhere in the world. The company had an incredible sophisticated internal HR platform that did elaborate succession planning and considered training and promotion as major workforce factors - there was little need to think much about recruitment because jobs for life. IBM could win any deal, maybe needing only to discount a little if things were very competitive.

It's impossible to imagine now what a lofty position the company held. It's not unfair to say that, if not dead, the IBM of old is no longer with us.

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1. ChuckMcM ◴[09 Dec 25 08:13 UTC] No.46202513[source]▶
It is absolutely a different company. I had the opportunity to intern there twice in the late 70's and then was acquired by them in 2015, the IBM of 1978 and the IBM of 2015 were very different businesses. Having "grown up" so to speak in the Bay Area tech company ecosystem where companies usually died when their founding team stopped caring, IBM was a company that had decided, as an institution, to encapsulate what it took to survive in the company's DNA. I had a lot of great discussions (still do!) with our integration executive (that is the person who is responsible for integrating the acquisition with the larger company) about IBM's practice in terms of change.