IBM has made a bold move to blast its way into the enterprise multicloud world by saying it would buy open source software pioneer Red Hat in a $34 billion stock acquisition.

For IBM the deal could mean many things. It makes it a bigger open source and enterprise software player for example, but mostly it gets Big Blue into the lucrative hybrid-cloud party targeting its towering competitors, Google, Amazon and Microsoft among others. Gartner says that market will be worth $240 billion by next year.

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“IBM, with this deal, is hoping to target enterprise customers who are still in the early stages of their cloud migration journey," said Dennis Gaughan, chief of research, applications at Gartner. "While a lot of people have already invested in public cloud services, there are still a lot of existing applications that will need to be modernized for them to run effectively in the public cloud,” .

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