It seems to me technology goes in cycles, and while cloud has had a meteoric rise to dominance, if the pendulum swings back to self-hosted - IBM is now poised to own a substantial part of big enterprise data center technology.
I do think at $34B it's a huge gamble, but as the author said, what other choice did they have? They aren't exactly centers of innovation any more (either of them.. and yes, some innovation comes out of redhat, but lets be honest, it's been tapering off for years now).
While there certainly could be a shift back, it seems like it will likely occur because of edge computing. The cloud is still relevant here, but the question also becomes what a company could do if it had distributed sensors, etc. everywhere.
I’m not sure that this helps Redhat or IBM though as it really breaks how they currently license software. AWS also already has software infrastructure offerings here as well so they could already be positioned to benefit if the trend changes.
All AWS, Azure, and Google would have to do to respond is offer cut-rate VMware hosting.
There isn't a ton of moat in selling the lowest common denominator. I don't know that IBM has much lead on the other side either, from Rackspace, for example.
I'm not sure if that would be an actual answer so an nth-wave of on-prem workloads.
It's not about owning a platform to run VMs, it's about owning the software stack to enable you to run and manage, bare-metal, VMs, containers, and high-level services on your customers own hardware I their own DC or colo'd.
