Box CEO Aaron Levie says that the IBM-Red Hat Deal showed what the underlying value of incumbent technology companies like Salesforce, ServiceNow, and “hopefully Box” is potentially worth.
Aaron Levie, CEO of Box, was interviewed on CNBC about the impact of the IBM-Red Hat deal on Box:
Red Hat Deal Puts IBM in a Great Position
Red Hat is a leader in commercial open source technology which is really the future of computing in any real IT environment or software development and IBM now has one of the world’s best companies in the open source space and the multi-cloud space.
I think it puts them in an incredible position to help enterprises that are moving to a multi-cloud environment be able to run their data centers and run their operations, whether it’s in the cloud or on-premises and a hybrid model for the future. It puts IBM in a great position.
IBM-Red Hat Deal Shows Increased Underlying Value
This is obviously an incredibly bold move on the part of Ginni (Ginni Rometty, CEO, IBM) and the rest of the team but one that I think we will look back in five or ten years and say that was a very defining decision. IBM is a great partner and we obviously want to root for their success but we partner with probably the majority of software and technology companies in the industry, so our job is to be interoperable and integrate with all the major technologies our customers use.
What the (IBM-Red Hat) deal showed was that the underlying value of some of these significant players is in many cases worth a lot – especially big incumbents. I think in general, companies like Workday, Salesforce, ServiceNow, and hopefully Box, we’re trying to build industry defining companies that will last quite some time.
Becoming a Core Part of the Technology Stack
I think, in general, when you think about enterprise IT, enterprise IT buyers are making long-term investments in the future of their technology architecture. It’s very sticky and there are massive modes in the technology that are being built out and if we do our job and continue to innovate we will become a core part of the technology stack of how the future of all enterprises operate.
That’s why these deals end up actually looking pretty good in hindsight when you can see how powerful these platforms are.