[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.