IBM To Buy US-Based Software Company Red Hat For $34 Billion
US-based software company Red Hat announced Sunday it had reached an agreement to sell itself to International Business Machines (IBM) Corp. for about $34 billion, including debt. This is by far IBM's biggest acquisition. IBM, which has a market capitalization of $114 billion, will pay $190 per share in cash for Red Hat, a 63 percent premium to Friday’s closing share price. Founded in 1993, Red Hat is one of the very few companies in the cloud computing sector that has both revenue growth and free cash flow. Its heritage is doing business around the Linux open-source operating system, the most popular type of open-source software, which was developed as an alternative to proprietary software made by Microsoft Corp. IBM has a public cloud that competes with Amazon Web Services. But developers use Red Hat's Linux on many public clouds, including those run by Microsoft and Google. That multi-cloud approach should help IBM bring in revenue as more companies choose to go to