New York/San Francisco — IBM’s $33bn purchase of Red Hat — the world’s second-largest technology deal ever — is aimed at catapulting the company into the ranks of the top cloud software competitors. The cash deal, IBM’s biggest by far, boosts the 107-year-old computer-services giant’s credentials overnight in the fast-growing and lucrative cloud market — and gives it much-needed potential for real revenue growth. The company once synonymous with mainframe computing has been slow to adopt cloud-related technologies and has had to play catch-up to market leaders Amazon.com and Microsoft in offering computing and other software and services over the internet. “We’ve been reshaping IBM for this moment,” CEO Ginni Rometty said on Monday. “This is all about resetting the cloud landscape and this is the inflection point to do it.” ‘Hybrid cloud market’ IBM has been positioning itself as a leader in the “hybrid cloud” market — in which companies run programs on both their own internal serve...
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