IBM today closed its $34 billion acquisition of Red Hat in a bid to fundamentally reframe IBM’s role and opportunity in open source and hybrid cloud development. Red Hat will become a subsidiary of IBM, but executives at both companies stressed there are no plans to combine operations, offices, channel partner programs, or how the businesses approach the needs of their respective clients.

“This acquisition is not about cost synergy,” said Arvind Krishna, senior vice president of cloud and cognitive software at IBM, during a conference call with analysts. There is no discussion of layoffs, all offices will remain, and, although he estimates there’s maybe a 5% overlap in capabilities in middleware, the products and services delivered by both companies will be maintained and further innovated upon going forward, he said.

The Red Hat brand and name is also staying just the same, and company executives say they have no desire to meld the cultures of both companies. In calling this the second chapter of the cloud journey for enterprises, Krishna noted that only 20% of enterprise applications moved to the cloud during the first chapter, which lasted at least a decade.

IBM CEO Ginni Rometty underlined that point during a televised interview with CNN. “This is the moment we reset the cloud landscape, and it’s all about being the No. 1 hybrid cloud provider in the world right now,” she said. “It is what clients need right now, and 80% of their workloads still need to move to the cloud.”

Enterprise applications are going to run on physical servers and multiple public clouds, and those different silos need a better way to interconnect, said Paul Cormier, Red Hat’s executive vice president of products and technologies, during the conference call. There is no one-size-fits-all approach — enterprises want a common operating platform for operations, security, and development, he explained.

“That’s why it’s such a huge market opportunity,” Cormier said. “The entire enterprise software landscape is retooling right now.”

During the interview on CNN, Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst said the prevailing goal is to take open source innovation, make it safe, secure, reliable, and plug it back in to wherever the data resides. “Open source is a powerful way that innovation happens. It’s open and it’s free and anyone can participate, and that’s a really powerful thing,” he said. Most enterprises don’t really care about technology, they just want to deliver functionality for their customers, he explained.

“Together what we’re giving them is freedom of choice with the ability to write something once and run it anywhere they need to,” Rometty said. “This is a hybrid multi-cloud play…It is the destination that we see and it is the foundation for the architecture of the next generation.”