[zellyn]

So right! It's been a career-long joke to me to contrast the language in the merger press release about immediate “synergies” and “efficiencies” with the “com.oldcompanyname.foo.bar” in the code 15 years later.

Basically the “immediate efficiencies” are laying off the recruiting and payroll people…

[kpil]

I think in most cases the synergies are thinning out rather fast, and the only positive effect that truly grow is financial muscles. If you do not depend on aggressive funding I suspect growing inefficiencies and complexities are the major forces.

An example from a customer that confided that after merging 8 national processes for reporting to various government agencies, the total running cost was unexpectedly almost 8 times higher than before due to the increased complexity and the amortised investment.

I suppose people know this, except the worst kind of bean counters, so this move is primarily motivated by “product brochure“ enhancement, absorbing a competent competitor that show some promise in a strategic area for IBM. The OpenShift business is just another mainframe in IBMs rather long history of "hybrid cloud“ strategy. They've been doing it for 50 years.