[Info-vax] IBM nearing deal to acquire Red Hat

[IanD]

Interesting article

I work for an organisation that buys plenty of red hat licenses, to the tune of 10's of 1000's per year. No shortage of money flowing to red hat from us

What's recently changed is how red hat now distribute licenses. It was consume first and then pay later after an automated scan with images deployed from satellite servers.
Now it's buy up front from a running pool on a licence sever.
I assume it's to bolster cash flow for red hat and to move towards a prepaid model than postpaid, the same as Telco has been moving towards and favoring for a long time now

The IBM cloud infrastructure we use has gone under various modifications over the years but it still is based very much on a batch philosophy mentality with many offerings still procured via catalogue items but that's probably also the result of the service agreements in place between the organisations than pure technical ability of their cloud offering. 
The constant gripe however is always how fast and complete AWS or Azure can do something versus IBM. IBM love to make the customer pay for development of so called 'new offerings', offerings standard I think on other cloud platforms

Throwing stuff out there in the cloud is a lot more than spinning up some severs, there's a whole swag of security governance issues, network interfacing and coordinated IT control and procedures to be established and when you have a ton of customer sensitive data, lots under government and industry regulation,  policies around what you can and cannot and should not ever send off, need to be tracked closely. Encrypting data is simply not enough

No wonder on prem cloud is growing and it's starting to look more and more like having a vendor 'come in' and run your IT shop, lol