Hey Google, Get Me a Red Hat Tattoo!

There’s so much tech news breaking this week I can’t keep up. 

I need some kind of artificial intelligence thingamajiggy to keep up with it all.

There are people working on that, but in the meantime, allow me to put my human filter on (while I still have some relevance) and convey what I perceive to be the most relevant news of the day/week.

First, on the IBM Red Hat front, the U.S. Department of Justice approved IBM’s $34B acquisition of Red Hat…While “IBM and Red Hat continue to work with competition authorities in other jurisdictions, and IBM continues to expect the transition to close in the second half of 2019.” 

FYI, the Red Hat Summit kicked into full gear today in Boston, and you can follow on Twitter at #RHSummit  And don’t forget to get your Red Hat tattoo while you wait for Ginni’s keynote to start this PM.

Google’s I/O developer conference also kicked off today and there’s more news coming out of Mountain View than you can shake an Alexa Echo at, but some headlines that caught my attention:

• New Google Pixel 3a, comes in with “excellent camera” and a 3.5mm headphone jack, but a slower processor and no wireless changing. Starting at $399, you can’t have everything.
• Android Q will now have a dark mode (welcome to the club, says iOS), better gestures, Live Captions, Focus Mode, and mas
• Google Assistant’s shifting into a higher gear, with the Google Borg claiming it’s now 10X faster and has more app-specific functionality. Read that privacy policy, though. It will also have a driving mode, which hopefully will put millions of eyes back on the road where they belong. We’ll see if Siri has a response to Google A’s new smarts at WWDC shortly.
• Google Lens is coming to Google Search, which means AR could soon help feet on the street more easily find local joints. Pokemon Go, it could be game on!

Of all these, Google Lens could be the most transformational in terms of real world implications, but I suspect I’ll get the most use out of Google Assistant’s improvements my own self. 

Finally, if you’re a full on cybersecurity enthusiast, The New York Times has a must read piece on how Chinese intelligence agencies acquired NSA hacking tools and repurposed them to attack American allies and private companies in Europe and Asia.

Talk about the laws of unintended consequences. Uh, could the last one out please lock down the Faraday Cage so we can put an ix-nay the Chinese acking-hay?

Wide Open (Source) Software

2018 has been the biggest year for open source software (OSS), evuh.

So writes Astasia Myers with Redpoint Ventures:

The most significant exit for an open source business was IBM’s $35B acquisition of Red Hat. As my colleague Tomasz Tunguz claimed, it was “a triumph of open source.” Red Hat’s acquisition was the largest software acquisition in history, and the third largest technology acquisition after Dell/EMC at $67B and JDS/SDL for $41B.

Next, in early November VMware acquired Heptio, a startup that helps companies deploy and manage upstream Kubernetes. Founded by ex-Googlers Craig McLuckie and Joe Beda, Heptio was mostly a services business with some open source projects like Ark, Sonobuoy, Contour, and Gimbal. Heptio competes against Red Hat so it is clear VMware is trying strengthening its role in the cloud-native ecosystem.

Hortonworks had a $5.2B merger with Cloudera, and Myers notes that there’s been at least $46.8B spent on acquiring open source companies.

See Myer’s post for a full breakdown of OSS deals since 2011.

The rise in open source and cloud solution has also led to some changes in the more traditional vertical software market.

Just today, HCL Technologies has paid $1.8 billion to pick up a number of IBM Software products, including Notes and Domino; Connections; on-prem versions of Portal, Commerce, and Unica; BigFix; and AppScan.

According to ZDNet:

“The products that we are acquiring are in large growing market areas like security, marketing, and commerce, which are strategic segments for HCL,” president and CEO of HCL Technologies C Vijayakumar said.

“Many of these products are well regarded by clients and positioned in the top quadrant by industry analysts.”

Vijayakumar added the company sees “tremendous potential” for creating as-a-service offerings by combining the acquisitions with its existing products.

A year ago in October, IBM had already entered into an arrangement that had HCL become responsible for the development of Domino products. 

End of an era?