European Commission unconditionally approves $34 Billion Red Hat Acquision by IBM

The European Commission has unconditionally approved Red Hat acquisition by IBM.

In October 2018, last year, IBM acquired Red Hat for USD $190.00 per share in cash leading to a total enterprise value of approximately $34 billion. Red Hat has been a provider of a number one (#1) of an enterprise Linux operating system known as Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

The focus of acquisition was the hybrid cloud market. IBM has been building integrated cloud offerings namely IBM Cloud, Digital iX Practice, Cloud Garages, IBM Z, Power and Storage on Linux etc. In fact, IBM Cloud Private, IBM Private Cloud for Data, IBM AI OpenScale and IBM MultiCloud manager are the latest offering in 2018.

According to the announcement, the European Commission looked at four major areas.

• Impact of IBM's Red Hat acquisition on the markets for middleware and system infrastructure software. European Commission concluded that the merged entity will still have competition in all potential markets.
• Risk of weakened competition if IBM or Red Hat leveraged their respective positions into neighbouring markets. The commission looked at if the merged entity can hurt competition by reducing interoperability of other software with Red Hat Enterprise Linux OS.
• Risks in access to Red Hat's source code and deal's influence on the development of specific open source projects to ease potential competition
• IBM's position on this acquisition to leverage the capabilities of Red Hat to further develop and offer open hybrid cloud solutions.

In an official press release, European Commission said, "The Commission concluded that the transaction would raise no competition concerns."