Big Blue’s latest mega-buy hands it a real-time data-streaming powerhouse built on KafkaIBM has cracked open its wallet again, agreeing to shell out $11 billion for Confluent in a bid to glue together the data sprawl underpinning the next wave of enterprise AI.The deal, announced Monday and just weeks after IBM laid off thousands, hands IBM a heavyweight in real-time data streaming as Big Blue bets that future generative and agentic AI systems will live or die on how well they can move and govern data across clouds, data centers, and legacy estates.IBM will pay $31 a share in cash for Confluent, whose Kafka-based platform has become a staple for organizations trying to pipe clean, consistent, and reusable data into applications and analytics engines.
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143 sats \ 1 reply \ @k00b 19h
At least from the outside, it appears IBM's business model is to acquire something nice, sell it to all their customers in multi-year contracts knowing a dependency will form, then let it slowly rot.
I'm probably super wrong. Their customers might be relatively invisible to someone like me. But that's what if feels like.
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72 sats \ 0 replies \ @optimism 13h
I think you're not far off. Also see #931362 haha
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