[ChuckMcM]

Having been in Chris' shoes (being acquired by IBM) I found the reactions of different people in the company most interesting. Several people had the same sort of "Everything is different now that IBM owns us." reaction, but if you unpack that, the reality is a bit different.

For a company like Redhat I can't imagine it will be largely changed in the first couple of years at least, so for that period of time you will be working with the same co-workers, and if you're not in the Redhat C-suite probably for the same boss in the same facilities on the same stuff. So in that regard nothing has changed.

What will be different will be access to a company that has been running for over 100 years and evolved over that time, at all levels. Facilities all around the world. Access to some of the scientists that you may have only read their papers but now can chat with via slack.

If you're currently an executive staff level type (VP, Exec VP, etc) and you're part of the acquisition, you're going to be landing in a whole different world of agendas and counter agendas, that can be tough to navigate. You will want to establish relationships quickly, they will be both rewarding and help you see things that might be coming your way that you would miss otherwise.

At its heart though, IBM is just another company trying to do things to make the world a better place and to profit off helping the world get there. You will find the Finance guys are ones who have the ability to make things happen or not, the marketing folks may often be distracted by shiny objects that don't seem to contribute to the vision, and some of the fading parts of the business are not going into the long goodnight easily.

And if you're patient and look clearly, you will see that fundamentally the company bought you so that you're technology could both improve the company and continue to grow in its own right, and so everyone is "on your side" to a large extent. The biggest danger to your dreams will be your own executives, not IBM. They are the ones who have gone from being masters of their own universe to a star in somebody else's universe, and sometimes that transition affects them in ways that isn't immediately apparent.

[maxxxxx]

"What will be different will be access to a company that has been running for over 100 years and evolved over that time, at all levels. Facilities all around the world. Access to some of the scientists that you may have only read their papers but now can chat with via slack."

I have never seen this materialize in any big company. Different departments may as well be different companies. They never talk to each other.

[filereaper]

Maybe not departments, but this statement is true: "Access to some of the scientists that you may have only read their papers but now can chat with via slack."

I've pinged many folks over Sametime (predecessor to Slack) just by having their name, you could then lookup their Sametime Id.

Most of the time it was over simple details, i.e "Hey, I see you're the author of this RedBook. In Chapter Foo Paragraph Bar, did you really mean FooBar or BazBaz?"

But hey, details are everything in our industry.

It was really nice to get the answer straight from the source, no matter which continent they were on. Anecdotal, but wanted to provide a counterpoint.

[ChuckMcM]

Yes, this was what I meant. I'm not sure what two departments talking would look like, but I do know what people hanging around after a tech talk discussing the subject at hand and brainstorming interesting collaboration ideas looks like.

I'll grant you that the technology Blekko brought to IBM (the crawler) was something that a lot of people who were inside the company were interested in, so there were inbound contacts as well when someone said, "Hey we're doing X and wondering if you can do Y?" And that often lead to a discussion about what crawlers could and couldn't do legally :-) But it also lead to lots of great collaborations on various data sets and projects.

"Companies" are filled with people who talk. The only place I've heard where this is a huge issue (from former and current employees) is Apple where secrecy is pretty rampant. And while every company seems to have some "special" projects that aren't discussed, general conversations seem to be fine.

At IBM there are a lot of really really smart people who have done really cutting edge research which for me, was kind of like being a kid in a candy store :-).

[kodablah]

> What will be different will be access to a company that has been running for over 100 years and evolved over that time, at all levels. Facilities all around the world. Access to some of the scientists that you may have only read their papers but now can chat with via slack.

I too was in similar shoes. While I agree with much of what you wrote, I disagree with this point. The size and compartmentalization of the company precludes cross-department access.

[ChuckMcM]

If you could, would you share a time when you tried to interact with a different department and were unable to?

I ask because it sounds like we had different experiences there. I found all IBMers to be very open to talking about what they were working on, as slack became more widely deployed it was even easier. (Sametime as an IM client was a bit clunky). People would post on their 'home' page what they were up to some times, I talked at length with an engineer working with the atomic force microscope (AFM) in San Jose.

[kodablah]

> If you could, would you share a time when you tried to interact with a different department and were unable to?

If this is what you meant, then my disagreement was misplaced as I never sought it out. By "access" I meant things like resource access on similar projects and the like. Watching 5 different cloud computing arms do the same siloed activities is what I meant. That open resource access is not fostered across the company by policy was my disagreement. Also, my experience predates Slack (but they did force us on Lotus email, ug).

[ssalazar]

> At its heart though, IBM is just another company trying to do things to make the world a better place

When has this ever been the prerogative of a multinational for-profit corporation?

[rwallace]

Well within living memory, actually. IBM research labs made many contributions to human knowledge without necessarily expecting short-term profit. I still remember when their scientists used a scanning tunneling microscope to write the letters IBM in xenon atoms, five atoms tall.

We have to adapt to today's world, but we should remember a better world, one in which it was not customary to treat life as a zero-sum game, did exist, not so long ago. Social problems only become unsolvable if everyone forgets they were once solved.

[gaius]

I still remember when their scientists used a scanning tunneling microscope to write the letters IBM in xenon atoms, five atoms tall.

That is what is known as “a marketing stunt”. Same as having Watson play Jeopardy.

[rwallace]

Sure, but the underlying technological capability was genuine.

[ssalazar]

> we should remember a better world, one in which it was not customary to treat life as a zero-sum game, did exist, not so long ago. Social problems only become unsolvable if everyone forgets they were once solved.

You’ll have to be more specific, as I’m not aware of any such world in recent memory.

[woodandsteel]

>At its heart though, IBM is just another company trying to do things to make the world a better place and to profit off helping the world get there.

No, no, no. A big company like IBM may have started out that way, but what almost inevitably happens over the long term is that selfish, greedy, ambitious, power-hungry, sociopathic people become employees and work their way up to the top (or get hired from other companies where they have done likewise) and turn the company to their own ends. And these ends are generally bad for the employees, the customers, and quite often in the long term the financial well-being of the company.

Now it is true that sometimes you get a reformer at the top like Nadella at Microsoft who honestly wants to do things right, and has the brains to figure out how to do it. That said, it is quite clear that this has not happened at IBM.

[newnewpdro]

> Now it is true that sometimes you get a reformer at the top like Nadella at Microsoft who honestly wants to do things right, and has the brains to figure out how to do it.

What kool-aid have you been swimming in?

[scirocco]

Quite clear that this has not happened at IBM.

Imagine Jim Whitehurst being CEO of IBM in 2 years.

[donmcronald]

> IBM is just another company trying to do things to make the world a better place

Yeah. That’s why they helped the Nazis and invented ILMT.

[calcifer]

No idea why you are being downvoted. IBMs actions during WW2 are well known. [1][2]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_and_the_Holocaust

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_during_World_War_II

[donmcronald]

The virtualization sub-licensing racket is less well known. Big companies with virtualization offerings will sell you attractive licenses based on measuring usage with a tool like ILMT. IMO it’s intentionally complicated with the goal of having people fall out of compliance. If you end up out of compliance you can be in a position where they claim you owe based on full capacity licensing (a theoretical max) and the bill is astronomical. They use that to strong arm you into buying a bunch of stuff you don’t need, especially cloud offerings.

Oracle and IBM both do it.

https://blogs.flexera.com/elo/2016/02/higher-costs-for-being...

https://www.businessinsider.com/oracle-customer-explains-aud...

[yourapostasy]

Have you run into a situation where ILMT was deployed, kept up to date, clients installed on all servers (typically injected into standard image like part of an Ansible playbook or Windows slipstream or similar), required VM hypervisor port open to ILMT, and a PWC license compliance audit (now part of IBM Global Services) still came up with a different number than ILMT and forced that upon the customer? Because if so, I'd surely like to DM with you to exchange notes, as that would be the very first time I've heard of that happening.

I'd much rather deal with IBM using ILMT than Microsoft or Oracle licensing. Every single one of my customers who have used ILMT and came through a PWC license compliance audit reported to me that the ILMT numbers were accepted as the official count, after an inspection of the customer's asset database compared with an ILMT server list showed that the ILMT clients were deployed pretty much everywhere. Flexera negotiates a special dispensation from IBM to get their numbers accepted on par with ILMT, but Flexera doesn't keep up on a timely basis (within a month or two) with ILMT's tracking of new license models issued by IBM.

It is true that if you are not using ILMT and an IBM license compliance audit team comes knocking, then your life is going to suck. Then again, IBM tells everyone in the paperwork to deploy ILMT, and they've made it as easy as possible for nearly anyone (up to about 5,000 servers) to install and run ILMT, and of course it is no-charge software. Usually only takes at most a week for most sites to install, stand up clients, get the firewall rules right (or set up procedure for updates over air-gaps), integrate into LDAP and SSO, get into backups and verify, compare results with actual licenses (what IBM calls "entitled"), etc., where the actual ILMT install itself usually only takes an hour or less using their all-in-one mode.

As far as my Microsoft and Oracle folks have told me, there is no official license management system that is written into the license contract verbiage like ILMT is into IBM's that they will accept as the official count, that short-circuits any license compliance conversations dead-right-there. If you or anyone reading this knows of any, then please point me to the tooling, as that will save me a hell of a lot of time dealing with Microsoft and Oracle.