IBM wisely abandoned its attempt to become a pure cloud infrastructure provider years ago, recognizing that it could never compete with the big three: Amazon, Microsoft and Google. Since then, she has helped IT organizations manage complex hybrid environments, using her financial clout to acquire a portfolio of leading companies.
It all started with $34 billion Acquisition of Red Hat in 2018, continued with the acquisition of Apptio last year, and that continued Wednesday when the company announced it would acquire cloud management provider HashiCorp for $6.4 billion.
With HashiCorp, Big Blue gains a suite of cloud lifecycle management and security tools, and a business that is growing significantly faster than any other IBM business – although the figure business is low by IBM standards: $155 million last quarter, up 15% from the previous year. This still makes it a healthy and growing business that IBM can add to its growing suite of hybrid cloud tools.
IBM CEO Arvind Krishna certainly sees the value in this for his company’s hybrid strategy, and he even threw in a reference to AI for good measure. “HashiCorp has a proven track record of enabling its customers to manage today’s infrastructure complexity and application proliferation. Combining IBM’s portfolio and expertise with HashiCorp’s capabilities and talent will create a comprehensive hybrid cloud platform built for the AI era,” he said in a statement.
HashiCorp made headlines last year when it changed the license of its open source tool Terraform to make it more enterprise-friendly. The community that helped build Terraform was not happy and responded by launching a new open source alternative called OpenTofu. HashiCorp recently accused the new community of abusing Terraform’s features. open source code when he created the OpenTofu fork. Now that the company is part of IBM, it will be interesting to see if it continues to pursue this thinking.
It’s worth noting that Red Hat also made headlines last year when it changed its open source license terms, also causing consternation in the open source community. Perhaps these companies will fit in well, both from a software perspective and their changing view of open source.
Just this week, the company introduced a new platform concept with the release of the infrastructure cloud, a concept that should fit perfectly into IBM’s hybrid cloud product catalog. Although they didn’t add much in the way of features, it unified the offerings under one umbrella, making it easier for sales and marketing to present them to customers.
If IBM treated HashiCorp the same as Red Hat, the company would maintain its independence within the IBM product family. AVOA, a research firm run by former CIO Tim Crawford, says the company would be wise to remain neutral.
“My reservation would be for IBM to move away from Hashicorp’s neutral position of working with multiple cloud providers and focus on IBM Cloud. I suspect that would not be the case, as IBM has recently shown how much more open they are towards other cloud providers,” Crawford wrote in a statement. recent blog post.
HashiCorp was founded in 2012 and has raised nearly $350 million before go public in 2021.
