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.
IBM has been around for over a hundred years, maybe they know a thing or two about running a software business :-)
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.
https://newsroom.ibm.com/2025-12-08-ibm-to-acquire-confluent...
I don't understand how this acquisition is relevant for AI.
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.
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.
*(yes I know about NATS)
anyone have an idea on how streamnative is doing? we're considering them for managed pulsar and unfortunately nobody else is in the game
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.
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...]
https://www.confluent.io/blog/confluent-acquires-warpstream/
Confluent stock soars 29% as IBM announces $11B acquisition deal
https://www.cnbc.com/2025/12/08/ibm-confluent-deal-data.html
Since when is streaming event logs AI? Am I taking crazy pills?
I'll start.