IBM Broadens Its Enterprise Software Stack With Confluent Buy

This year, about 45 percent of the revenues at Big Blue will come from software. But IBM wants to push this up to half of revenues and then onwards from there. IBM also wants to find the modern AI era analogs to its venerable WebSphere application server, which gave it big revenues and relatively easy profits from enterprise customers during the commercial Internet era.

Back in the late 1990s, IBM grabbed the Apache Web server and the Tomcat Java servlet container system and turned it into WebSphere, which it embedded into its own proprietary and Unix systems and which it also offered as an alternative to Oracle’s WebLogic middleware. WebSphere probably generated tens of billions of dollars in revenues in more than three decades, although it is hard to say because it was embedded in so many ways with IBM’s Power Systems and System z mainframes; it was almost certainly wildly profitable, but has been waning as that application-database part of the enterprise IT estate has…