IBM to acquire Confluent (opens in new tab)

At one point we worked with a large energy company that was basically sold something LLM-like (large-scale indexing and searching/querying of documents) in 2016 or so. IBM had a team of 90 people doing full-time data ingestion for something like 26,000 documents. We got asked to do a counter-product in two weeks, which was literally just a TF-IDF search and some smarts around ingesting different types of documents. Both solutions performed approximately equally, except one cost something in the order of $185m and one cost $40k. Watson continued running for about a year until an external data science contractor realised they could query Watson for highly confidential board meeting notes, and it would provide full previews into the documents. The project was shuttered shortly after.

Alas, nobody gets fired for hiring IBM.

Edit: you also seem to be giving too much credence to Watson. Watson was actually mostly a marketing tool designed to win in Jeopardy and nothing else. It was constructed specifically to compete in that use-case and was nowhere near to the architecture of a general transformer which is capable of figuring out meta-patterns within language and structurally understanding language. You can read about Watson's design and architecture here if you're curious: https://www.cs.cornell.edu/courses/cs4740/2011sp/papers/AIMa...

I worked with IBMers. The main priority for a lot of them is to ensure continuous employment for themselves and their buddies. They'd add unnecessary complexity to a product to stretch out the development for another couple of years. And they work at leisure pace for tech. Actual 9 to 5, many coffee breaks. They can't compete.

I do. I remember going to a chat once where they wanted to get people on-board in using it. It was 90 minutes of hot air. They "showed" how Watson worked and how to implement things, and I think every single person in the room knew they were full of it. Imagine we were all engineers and there were no questions at the end.

Comparing Watson to LLMs is like comparing a rock to an AIM-9 Sidewinder.

IBM has a ton of Enterprise software, backed by a bunch of consultants hiding in boring businesses/governments.

They also do a ton of outsourcing work where they will be big enterprise IT support desk and various other functions. In fact, that side has gotten so big, IBM now has more employees in India in then any other country.

Leadership in IBM also thought that Watson was like what what OAI/Anthropic/Google are doing now. It wasn't. Watson was essentially a ML pipeline over-optimized on Jeopardy, which is why it failed in literally every other domain.

Outside of Jeopardy, Watson was just a brand.

It really is probably that strangest company in tech which you think could be mysterious and intriguing. But no one cares. It’s like no one wants to look behind the boring suit and see wtf. From my low point on that bell curve I can’t see how they are even solvent.

Athough i think they just di/dont know how to adapt these to market that isnt a enterprise behemoth , rather than develop/price it so more devs can take a hold and experiment.

IBM lives off huge multi-year contract deals with their customers, each are multi-multi-million dollars worth. IBM has many of these contracts, maybe ~2000 of them around the planet, including your own government wherever it is that you live. This is ALL that matters to IBM. ALL. That. Matters.

These huge contracts get renegotiated at every X years. IBM renewal salespeople are tough and rough, in particular the ones on the renewal teams, and they spend every minute of every hour in between renewals grooming the decision makers, sponsors, champions and stakeholders (and their families) within these big corporations. Every time you see an IBM logo at a sports event (and there are many IBM-sponsored events), that's not IBM marketing to you the ad-viewer. They are there for grooming their stakeholders, who fight hard to be in the best IBM sponsored-seats at those venues, and in the glamorous pre and after party, celebs included. IBM also sponsors other stuff, even special programs at universities. Who go to these universities? Oh, you bet, the stakeholder's kids, who get the IBM-treatment and IBM-scholarship at those places.

But the grooming is not enough. The renewal is not usually at risk - who has the balls to uninstall IBM out of a large corp? What is at risk is IBM's growth, which is fueled by price increases at every renewal point not the sale of new software or new clients - there are no new clients for IBM anywhere anymore! These price increases need to happen, not just because of inflation but because of the stock price and bonuses that keep the renewal army and management going strong, since this is a who-knows-who business. To justify the price increase internally at those huge client corps (not to the stakeholder but to their bosses, boards, users, etc) IBM needs to throw a bone into these negotiations. The bone is whatever acquisition you see they make: Red Hat, Hashicorp... Or developments like Watson. Or whatever. They are only interested in acquiring products or entering markets that can be thrown at those renewal negotiations, with very few exceptions. Why Confluent? Well, because they probably did their research and decided that existing Confluent licenses can be applied to one (yeah, one) or many renewal contracts as growth fuel for at least 1-to-N iterations of renewals.

Renewal contracts correspond anywhere from 60% to 95% of IBM's revenue, depending on how you account for the the consulting arm and "new" (software/hw sales/subscriptions). I particularly have not seen lots of companies hiring IBM consultants "just because we love IBM consultants and their rates", so consulting at a site is always tied to the renewal somehow, even if billed separately or not billed at all. Same for new sw sales, if a company wants something IBM has on their catalog from their own whim and will, then that will just probably be packed into the next renewal because that's stakeholder leverage for justifying the renewal's increase base rate. Remember, a lot of IBM's mainframes are not even sold, they are just rentals.

Most IBM investment into research programs, new tech (quantum computing!) etc are there just to help the renewals and secure a new Govt deal here and there. How? Well, maybe the increase in the renewal for the, ie, State of Illinois contract gets a bone thrown in for a new "Quantum Research Center (by IBM)" at some U of I campus or tech park that the now visionary Governor will happily cut the ribbon, photo op and do the speech. Oh wait! I swear I made this up as an example, but this one is actually true, lol:

https://newsroom.ibm.com/2024-12-12-ibm-and-state-of-illinoi...

You get the drill?

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.

Investopedia says[0] they make 60% of their profit from "Software" but how much of that is "providing cloud solutions" and similar software-adjacent consulting exercises?

[0]: https://www.investopedia.com/how-ibm-makes-money-4798528

HashiCorp also changed their licenses to non-open-source licenses, but again I think this was technically pre-acquisition (I think as they were gearing up to be a more attractive target for an exit).

Red Hat has far more autonomy. We are not structured the same.

On the HR side — many good people are leaving; new hires have to be on-site for 3 days and located in 4 "strategic" locations in the US.

https://www.centos.org/centos-stream/

And Fedora is still the upstream of RHEL, nothing changed there.

From my perspective, as someone who is deeply suspicious of IBM in general, that's a plus.

What do you mean by that, like "centos/stream" (aka https://www.centos.org/download/ ) ?

AI is just the lastest buzzword. Everyone has it, because they have to. Don't look behind the curtain.

/s

RedPanda was a huge win for us. Confluent never made sense to us since we were always so cost conscious but the complexity/risk of managing a critical part of our infra was always something I worried about. RedPanda was able to handle both for us - cheaper than Kafka hosting vendors with significantly better performance. We were pretty early customers but was a huge win for us.

I've been pretty happy with RP performance/cost/functionality wise. It isn't Kafka though, it's a proprietary C++ rewrite that aims for 100% compatibility. This hasn't been an issue in the 2+ years since we migrated prod, but YMMV.

A lot of the successful projects at the original company are now dead.

It's also weird being in IBM, because if your "contract" ends they put you on the bench. Then you basically have to job hunt within IBM, and if you can't find anything within a month or so you are out. It's super weird.

Hint: by all means possible, make sure you are not the owner of (or manager of the person who owns) any assets beyond your personal laptop. If, for example, you end up being the owner of all the development and test servers of the original company, then it will become your responsibility to ensure that each OS (of each LPAR of each VM) is security compliant, is running the end-point asset manager, and has up to date OS patches, that the DASD is encrypted, and you must periodically show physical proof that the asset still exists and indicate where it's located- photos of assets tags or whatever. It will be your responsibility to dispose of the asset (with all associated paperwork) at the end of its life.

It helps if such machines are not actually on the 9. network, or are behind an internal firewall (then they don't care about the security compliance as much).

I've heard chatter from our engineering leadership that IBM is trying to push some silly initiatives, but we've been able to prioritize the right work so far.

I also get more equity (one time award + employee stock purchase plan) than I did previously, and with how IBM stock has been performing lately this has been a net positive for me.

FWIW I have heard that IBM used to force their management style on acquisitions in years past, so perhaps this is a fairly recent shift towards a less hands-on approach.

The worst is when your sales team (and all of its super valuable institutional knowledge of your specific market) are cut, and all your management is laid off so that the new corp's managers (who have embedded themselves into the corporate bureaucracy like a trichinosis worm) can treat all your teams as free headcount.

Soon, your company, which was acquired for growth, can't do anything and turns into an albatross around the new corp's neck. So the layoffs begin.

    > ...and internal systems they have to use, whose sole purpose is to make sure nobody does anything

Yeesh. Which level of hell is that?

Dilbert’s company buys an “artsy” startup (represented by a chap with a goatee and a ponytail).

Dilbert comments something like “We get your energy and skill, and we provide … an endless supply of 3-ring binders.”

To which the chap replies “I hear that if your name goes into a binder, you lose your soul.”

It's a fact that a publicly traded company is beholden to Wall Street and any time such a company would use their earnings for R&D the P/E and margins go down (i.e. spending more money to earn the same) and this is considered a negative signal at Wall Street and the company gets punished in the market.

So the only way a company can spend their earnings is to pay dividends or buy assets such as other companies, which then must be squeezed for margins.

More here:

https://www.cringely.com/2015/06/03/autodesks-john-walker-ex...

They seem to primarily benefit from kickbacks in the form of both leasing and technical contracts for things like opening offices in a location for tax benefits or to promote local economy.

Then they see how far they can cut back their end of the contract after the first few months (e.g. Maybe we agreed to have 500 employees in an office, but since nobody is allowed in, we think we can get away with 100 employees.) Then this turns into trolling about how the contract never defines what in office means so can we offshore… Too much undefined confusion, so I guess we get to break the contract but keep what the mayor paid us… Then they just shut down the office and move on to the next location.

It seems like the local government must be in on these schemes for leasing. Otherwise this wouldn’t be going on for decades as it has been.

The other part of business, technical contracts, is similar except instead of leasing it’s providing some sort of infrastructure coverage for something big. It starts off with good faith fulfilling the contract. Then a few months later it’s like well we have a US military contract that demands US employees but US employees are too expensive. What if we offshore but all the traffic is technically going through a single US employee’s computer which is what the contract technically demands.

Then it turns into well we have offshore people working on this anyway, why not just give them direct access and we’ll have a US person overseeing them. Lay everyone else off.

Then they see how long they can get away with this until someone gets mad. Then they take one step back to see how close to the technical contract they can get while threatening to abandon the whole thing at the same time.

Along with this sort of atmosphere and attitude for the law, it seems we see them constantly doing everything possible to constantly fire old people or anyone else that has legally protected status. So you’ll get statistical analytics on ways to fire protected people based around the constant performance reviews with statistics being used to see how close groups of protected people can be removed without statistically breaking the law. Whatever that algorithm is.

That plays into just straight up cutting people, but it also goes into a lot of other subsystems of skirting the law, like if old people can’t relocate as easily then hopping offices and forcing people to relocate 5000 miles is a way they can be eliminated. Part of this might be moving people onto new teams and then saying that team has to be in office for some made up reason, and then firing them for not relocating or using some made up metric like badging timestamps to get them, or some other technicality like leaving for lunch 5 minutes early despite being a salaried employee which is reported as hourly because of tax trolling.

I don’t know how IBM still exists because from my perspective it’s pretty clear they’re breaking or at best on razor thin gray line on ice on just about every possible law you could break.

we keep pushing Pulsar and moving things - https://streamnative.io/blog/ursa-wins-vldb-2025-best-indust...

The spin-off also explains the drop in revenue. In 2021, the first results reported excluding Kyndryl, IBM had revenues of $57.4B [1]. Since 2021, revenue grew by ~9% to reach $62.75B in 2024.

[0] https://www.kyndryl.com/us/en/about-us/news/2021/11/2021-11-... [1] https://newsroom.ibm.com/2022-1-24-IBM-RELEASES-FOURTH-QUART...

I can't think of a better place for longevity of open source projects than Apache (maybe I'm out of the loop?).

Compare it to the Linux Foundation where everything is a single commercial vendor sponsored project. At lease Apache requires independent governance and a diverse ecosystem before the project graduates.

Am I missing something with the Apache Foundation?

But you can also use Kafka as pub-sub system (duplicate messages to each subscribers)

Messages are not deleted after consumption (configurable)

IMO they were simultaneously worse situated for near-real-time stream processing and for S3-esque cloud storage, areas Kafka and Confluent excelled.

https://www.redpanda.com/compare/redpanda-vs-kafka

Not a drop in replacement, but worth looking at.

Some redundant departments (HR, finance, accounting and the like) will be downsized after the acquisition.

Engineering and product will be unaffected in the short term, but in a year or two the IBM culture will start to seep in, and that would be a good time for tenured employees to start planning their exits. That's also when lock-up agreements will expire and the existing leadership of Confluent will depart and be replaced by IBM execs.

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.

IBM will likely give Confluent employees a large pay package, and then let them go after the merger.

edit: btw, it's typical for any acquisition/merger