RALEIGH, N.C. _ IBM's $34 billion purchase of Red Hat has officially closed, the two companies announced Tuesday morning.
Last October, IBM said that it would buy the Raleigh-based software maker for $34 billion, which would make Red Hat the biggest acquisition that IBM has made in its 107-year history and the world's second-largest technology deal ever, according to Bloomberg.
The deal will make Red Hat part of IBM's Cloud division, the two companies said when the deal was announced last year. Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst will become part of IBM's senior management team as part of the deal and will report to IBM CEO Ginni Rometty.
The two companies have stressed that Red Hat will remain largely independent as part of the deal, but that has not kept many in the Raleigh area to worry about a potential culture clash between the legacy tech giant IBM and the open-source ethos of Red Hat.
At the unveiling of a new Red Hat logo in May, Whitehurst stressed that Red Hat was still going to be operating in an independent manner for the most part. At that time, the company was trading in its logo from the late 1990s for a new, sleeker version.
"We were in the process of doing this (logo change) when the IBM merger came up, so this is certainly demonstrating that it is business as usual" at Red Hat, Whitehurst told the N&O. "We did this independently _ we showed it to them but we didn't make any changes _ and they were supportive of it. ... If it made sense before the deal, then it makes sense after because we are independent."
In May, the Department of Justice gave the go-ahead to IBM's $34 billion takeover of Raleigh-based Red Hat, The News & Observer reported.
IBM said in its filing then that the Justice Department did not find any anti-trust violations that needed to be resolved.
