I'm sorry, but you may think this is the way it goes, but I suspect you'll find it isn't so. My prediction is that you will be booted as CEO within a year, not because you aren't awesome but because you are a big part of Compose and IBM will go directions you won't like.
Hope I'm wrong, but I can't see how this will be anything but disastrous. Your key company abilities were you controlled your own destiny to a degree, and you could react quickly. Now you are part of a larger group within IBM, I doubt this will be possible.
I do wish you the best though, and that my dire prediction is completely wrong. I've just seen what happens when a smaller company is bought by a massive one.
A relevant counter-example: the group bringing Compose into IBM is run by the former leadership team at Cloudant (including yours truly). We're incredibly excited to have mrkurt & co. on board; Compose does a great job of filling out the Bluemix services portfolio and gives us a solid platform for launching new offerings going forward.
Well I can't be CEO of IBM! Not this year, at least.
I've seen utterly awful acquisitions, and good acquisitions. You're right that there's a lot we can't control, and we could be ground up by the big corp machinations, but I do actually think IBM has a big interest in not screwing us up. We shall see.
If it helps any, from my prior observations in situations like this, you'll know things are going bad when IBM starts "recommending" their personnel for management positions in mid-level and above.
That's "the canary dying in the mine" to watch for IMHO.
We had many of those fears when we (Vivisimo now Watson Explorer) were acquired. I'm a consultant on the implementations side. It's been almost 3 years. The C levels did leave but most of the founders and original employees still work for IBM even after the mandatory period. Basically, my job is still the same with a little bit of extra bureaucracy that comes with companies of that size.
Our client base seems to be growing much quicker now after getting fully integrated. It seems like people may be buying our technology almost by accident (packaged deals, etc) and now realizing they have it and want to actually use it. That's something that seems unique to these huge tech firms. Before we had to sell each person.
Hope I'm wrong, but I can't see how this will be anything but disastrous. Your key company abilities were you controlled your own destiny to a degree, and you could react quickly. Now you are part of a larger group within IBM, I doubt this will be possible.
I do wish you the best though, and that my dire prediction is completely wrong. I've just seen what happens when a smaller company is bought by a massive one.