North Patrol is a consulting firm specialized in the design of digital services and information systems. We shape ideas into a vision and service concept, find the best architectural and technological solutions, design a functional user experience, and compete to find the ideal partner for implementation work. We do not sell implementation projects, nor do we sell licenses; we are genuinely on the side of the customer.
For HCL, this may be mostly about buying customers. With this deal, HCL gets 5000 customers to which they can provide many kinds of support services.
A quote from Bloomberg's article: “The asset-sale comes as IBM is seeking to become a leader in the hybrid cloud market, which combines software and services delivered over the public Internet with similar offerings run on companies’ own servers and data centers. In October, the Armonk, New York-based company agreed to buy Red Hat Inc., a specialist in this area, for $33 billion.”
Perhaps the fact, that the stock price of HCL declined five (5) percent after the deal was published, describes the transaction best.
The deal suits very well into the IBM story line. The company pursuits to expand its offering in many kinds of cloud services and service related infrastructures. To some extend, “old fashioned” on-premises installed software products did not sit very well in this new strategy. For example, from the Commerce set IBM excluded Watson related parts from the trade, even though the core platform was sold (WebSphere Commerce).
The conclusion of North Patrol about the transaction: Despite the capabilities of IBM WebSphere Commerce, it is now even more difficult to recommend it as a platform for demanding web stores. Magento and Hybris are thanking – at least in Finland.