FRESH

Hacker News

Home

IBM to acquire Confluent

439 points by abd12

by notepad0x90

20 subcomments

This is so fascinating to me. I mean how IBM keeps taking over other companies, but they consistently deliver low quality/bottom-tier services and products. Why do they keep doing the same thing again and again? How are they generating actual revenue this way?
Ok, so does anyone remember 'Watson'? It was the chatgpt before chatgpt. they built it in house. Why didn't they compete with OpenAI like Google and Anthropic are doing, with in-house tools? They have a mature PowerPC (Power9+? now?)setup, lots of talent to make ML/LLMs work and lots of existing investment in datacenters and getting GPU-intense workloads going.
I don't disagree that this acquisition is good strategy, I'm just fascinated (Schadenfreude?) to witness the demise of confluent now. I think economists should study this, it might help avert larger problems.

by npalli

6 subcomments

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 :-)

by hadrien01

8 subcomments

Genuine question: how did the IBM acquisitions of Red Hat and HashiCorp turn out?
For Red Hat, there's no longer an official "public" distribution of RHEL, but apart from that they seemingly have been left alone and able to continue to develop their own products. But that's only my POV as a user of OSS Red Hat products at home and of RHEL and OpenShift at work.

by jhickok

10 subcomments

“With the acquisition of Confluent, IBM will provide the smart data platform for enterprise IT, purpose-built for AI.”
https://newsroom.ibm.com/2025-12-08-ibm-to-acquire-confluent...
I don't understand how this acquisition is relevant for AI.

by b33f

3 subcomments

Maybe a good time to consider alternatives https://www.redpanda.com/compare/redpanda-vs-kafka

by JSR_FDED

19 subcomments

IBM have an absolutely stellar record of blowing acquisitions. The highly motivated newly acquired team will be in honeymoon phase for 3 months, and then it slowly dawns on them that they’ve joined an unbelievably rigid organization where things like customer satisfaction and great products don’t matter at all. Then they’ll be in shock and disbelief at the mind boggling Byzantine rules and internal systems they have to use, whose sole purpose is to make sure nobody does anything. Finally, the core IBM sales force will start to make demands on them and will short to ground any vestiges of energy, time, opportunity and motivation they might have left. The good team members will leave and join a former business partner, or decide to spend more time with the family. They’ll meet often at the beginning to relive the glory days of pre-acquisition and recount times where they went went above and beyond for that important early customer. But then these meetings will become fewer and fewer. Finally they’ll find a way of massaging their resumes to cast the last years as being “at the heart of AI infrastructure”.

by theta_d

1 subcomments

I worked for IBM Cloud about 6+ years ago. While there, we had to connect to a Softlayer VPN to get into our Jira instance. My VPN account and Jira account never got provisioned so I couldn't connect nor see the Jira board. My team-mates couldn't even assign a ticket to me b/c of this. They would just put my initial's in the ticket summary and send me a slack of the details.
It was right before I left that we got our own Jira instance. This was all around the time of the Red Hat acquisition. I remember the announcement b/c we used SuSE for everything IIRC.

by Zigurd

0 subcomment

It's like how lots of species evolve into crabs, or crab like things. Instead of dying out evolutionarily, failed giants like IBM evolve into Computer Associates.

by jsumrall

0 subcomment

Seems like a great day for Pulsar / StreamNative and Redpanda who are going to get a lot of new customers in the coming years.
When looking for alternatives to Kafka these are the most promising options I found, not counting RabbitMQ which needs no introduction.
Pulsar seems to be 'kafka done better'. The version of Kafka that Confluent used internally (Kora) seems closer to Pular as well. Pulsar has a lot of features that Kafka doesn't have, like per-message acknowledgement, similar to RabbitMQ. And it has protocol support for RabbitMQ and Kafka, so can be a drop-in replacement.
Redpanda seems like a great re-implementation of Kafka.
I'm hoping this boosts Pulsar's status and helps get some traction for StreamNative. It seems like the best technical solution for events and messaging. It just needs a bit more market adoption to make an easier choice for enterprise, in my opinion. This might be that moment.
https://streamnative.io/
*(yes I know about NATS)

by zkmon

7 subcomments

Kafka is already past it's prime time. Time for new solutions for the oldest problem - sending a message.

by rileymichael

2 subcomments

ibm also acquired datastax (managed pulsar) this year. building on top of these specialized managed service providers is becoming increasingly risky. at this point i'd rather use one of the kneecapped cloud provider offerings if possible (azure event hubs / aws msk / etc.) than risk being extorted in a few years as the result of some acquisition. at least you can work around the limitations..
anyone have an idea on how streamnative is doing? we're considering them for managed pulsar and unfortunately nobody else is in the game

by moulick

1 subcomments

Confluent had great stuff but their prices were crazy. When we got a quote from them, it was 20x more than what we could run on our own. We got quoted something like ~500k/year and my math on running it on AWS came around 25k for the same sized cluster via Strimzi operator on dedicated K8s nodes. We could hire a dedicated 3 person team to manage the cluster for the same price lol.
Now AWS is eating Confluent's lunch with it's managed Kafka. AWS MSK is still a little rough like all AWS services but it's still cheaper and a no-brainer if you are already on AWS.

by geodel

0 subcomment

This is great news. Kafka (the messaging/streaming platform) has finally found its natural home.

by shrubble

0 subcomment

IBM is buying market share, not a surprise; at least one telecom has all their Kafka stuff on the Confluent cloud, and there must be 1000s of such customers.

by elcapitan

2 subcomments

At least you can now safely buy into Kafka, as nobody ever got fired for buying IBM.

by curiosity42

0 subcomment

The only way (95%+) companies selling to enterprises survive are if they get bought by a bigger platform and the sales force of the bigger platform just has to sell an extra line item. If you want to make money, track companies that have sales and marketing expenses same order / same / higher than revenue and then create a synthetic index of these companies (they need to have sold something like $1BN in license in aggregate over time - maintenance stream and you confirm that the pig can be sold somehow) . most will be eventually sold at a premium to their traded price.

by jcims

2 subcomments

IBM was teabagging the Hasicorp booth at re:Invent with conspicuously old hardware set out like a museum piece. Ugh.

by semessier

0 subcomment

11 billion invested in multiple hardware developments including moonshots would have been more sensible that for Kafka operator (remember MQSeries/MQ btw)

by PeterCorless

1 subcomments

I have thought quite a bit today about the news from Confluent and IBM. I have friends and colleagues at both companies. When I was an undergrad at Carnegie Mellon University in the 1980s I used to wear a big brown and tan IBM button that said "THINK."
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...]

by jarym

0 subcomment

Let the Bluewashing begin. Everything will be WebSphere-first and then WebSphere-only.

by gtirloni

1 subcomments

If Apache Foundation is where open source projects go to die (a bit unfair though), IBM is the equivalent for for-profit companies.

by rwmj

2 subcomments

How is this different from Apache Qpid or RabbitMQ or IBM MQ (at least the first and third of those is already owned by IBM!)

by purplezooey

1 subcomments

Adjacent space, but can't help but wonder why Confluent did so much better than MapR

by leeoniya

1 subcomments

previously...
https://www.confluent.io/blog/confluent-acquires-warpstream/

by hjaveed

0 subcomment

good for the founding team! Kafka is an enterprise bloat. most of the queueing solutions could be built with something much simpler

by jituyadav

6 subcomments

is it good or bad for confluent employees?

by ChrisArchitect

0 subcomment

Some market reaction
Confluent stock soars 29% as IBM announces $11B acquisition deal
https://www.cnbc.com/2025/12/08/ibm-confluent-deal-data.html

by belter

2 subcomments

This is so funny. Now CNBC says "...The addition of Confluence will strengthen IBM’s artificial intelligence portfolio..."
Since when is streaming event logs AI? Am I taking crazy pills?

by semessier

0 subcomment

the price sounds a little bit high from a technical perspective

0 subcomment

by itsanaccount

7 subcomments

And the enshittification treadmill continues. Great time to be a kafka alternative.
I'll start.
https://github.com/tansu-io/tansu

by mistercheph

0 subcomment

Another genius move from International Business Machines!

by David_0101

0 subcomment

[dead]

by YouAreWRONGtoo

0 subcomment

[dead]

by udev4096

0 subcomment

How is IBM still alive? Or is it trying to prove the same

by ekropotin

1 subcomments

Could anyone please explain what IBM is even doing these days? Where revenue is coming from?