Server: Five Ways to Look at IBM Buying Red Hat, SUSE Talking OpenStack

Having spent decades writing about the fallout of enterprise technology mergers and acquisitions I think I can say, with expert confidence, that nobody ever calls these things correctly. A long-held tradition calls for rapid analysis, a glance at stock price movements, a weak pun on the potential new name for the company, a quick call around of the usual suspects, maybe an off-the-record chat with folks with an axe to grind and a hasty conclusion that the result will be either disastrous or epoch making. With that in mind, I've held back commenting on IBM agreeing to buy Red Hat… until now.

Bitter experience has taught me the fraught dangers involved in bold analysis or confident prognostication, for your reporter is the man who once considered Apple "finished" and tipped you off that Amazon's Kindle was a "crummy e-book format". So I have waited and bided my time and only now sagely bring you the artfully back-covering five possible ways to look at IBM buying Red Hat.

Digital transformation is the ‘catch-all’ phrase used to describe the acceleration of IT development to meet the fundamental changes in how businesses operate and deliver value to their customers. While this is different in many industry verticals, companies share some common characteristics on this internal-culture changing journey.