IBM/ Red Hat Acquisition
IBM has announced that it will acquire Red Hat in a deal worth approximately $34 billion.
This is further evidence of companies appreciating the power of open source ecosystems as prior deals this year show, such as:
-Microsoft’s purchase of GitHub for $7.5bn
-Salesforce’s purchase of MuleSoft for $6.5bn
Financial Services Embracing Open Source
Financial services institutions are also embracing open source.
Deutsche Bank started making its computer code publicly available for the first time in 2017.
This was the bank’s first contribution to open source technology.
Blockchain Ecosystems
Public blockchains demonstrate the power of open-source ecosystem effects.
Bitcoin has inspired an entirely new ecosystem which is leveraging incentive mechanisms, rewarding members of communities, creating network effects, and new business models.
We have explored the ecosystem effects of open-source when combined with tokenization in many of our reports.
We believe that we are on the cusp of a tipping point in digital asset innovation through the combination of:
- A digitally-savvy user-base who embrace new technology;
- The power of open collaboration by developers; and
- Entrepreneurs identifying new business models within open-source software.
You can read about that here:
https://www.celent.com/insights/921620914
Open Source Strategy
It won’t be all plain sailing though.
Generating sustainable competitive advantage within an open-source environment is fundamentally different to proprietary software.
We explored different ways for new fintechs and incumbent corporations to think about this in this report:
https://www.celent.com/insights/149443959
However, it is clear that open source will drive future value-generation and those institutions with a strategic advantage in digital assets will thrive in this new finanial environment.
We can see this already with the financial strength of the likes of Binance, Coinbase, and other new digital asset institutions.
How long before one of these new digital asset entrants acquires a legacy financial institution?
