IBM closed its $34 billion purchase of Red Hat, sealing the world’s second-largest technology deal ever and setting up the iconic U.S. company on a path to try to compete with top software purveyors in the cloud.
The 108-year-old International Business Machines Corp., once synonymous with mainframe computing, has been struggling to adopt cloud-related technologies. It’s playing catch-up to market leaders Amazon.com Inc. and Microsoft Corp. in offering computing and other software and services over the internet.