International tech major IBM has finished the acquisition process of Red Hat Inc, the maker of a popular Linux operating system, in a whopping $34-billion deal.
The deal announced on Tuesday is the 100-year old company’s biggest purchase till date as IBM makes a move into high-margin businesses.
The acquisition will boost IBM’s cloud presence and offer “a next-generation hybrid multi-cloud platform” that will be “based on open source technologies, such as Linux and Kubernetes”.
Red Hat, which was founded in 1993, will also continue “to build and expand its partnerships, including those with major cloud providers, such as Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud and Alibaba”.
Red Hat’s team will remain intact under the new ownership, and so will its headquarters in California.
IBM’s cloud revenue is currently 25 per cent of its total revenues.
