As some TechTarget reporters were finishing their last podcasts for the year, we sat down briefly and tried to view the longer picture, to look through the glass darkly toward the past.

Now, you are taught not to dwell on history from your first days in this field called journalism; people can buy books if that is what they want.

But a calendar with days rapidly dwindling might lead you to do just that, and best editorial practices be dammed.

And the tentative conclusion on some of our parts was that the big mergers of 2018 don’t stack up to those of yore.

That is even though the transactions hit some pretty heady dollar amounts.

They don’t really seem on par with the big mergers of the past 20 years, these jaundiced observers ventured.

IBM buying Lotus, Oracle buying Sun — those were some game changers. They signaled big industry shifts or put bookends on identifiable tech eras. Maybe it was the outsized nature of some of the characters involved.

An ongoing move to cloud computing is behind IBM’s bid for Red Hat, or Microsoft’s deal for GitHub, which are the topics discussed in this podcast. The move to cloud now seems predestined, but how it will actually transpire for these noted player will be determined by customers. Stay tuned.

This is part of a series of end-of-the year podcasts. I joined Senior Executive Editor Ed Scannell and analyst Mike Matchett, principal and founder of the Big Data Small World consultancy, for this  SearchDataManagement-hosted look-back at 2018 podcast.

The post Both IBM and Microsoft get open source religion in big 2018 acquisitions appeared first on Talking Data Podcast » Episodes.

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