HashiCorp just signed an agreement to be acquired by IBM for $6.4 billion ($35 per share in cash) “to accelerate the multi-cloud automation journey we began almost 12 years ago,” announces in the preamble Armon Dadgar, co-founder and until now technical director of the company. Following the acquisition, HashiCorp teams will continue to develop products and services under the company name and operate as a division within IBM Software.
Both the boards of directors of IBM and HashiCorp have approved the transaction. The acquisition remains subject to HashiCorp shareholder approval, regulatory approvals and other customary closing conditions. IBM plans to complete the transaction by the end of 2024.
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From the cloud to artificial intelligence, the world has evolved over the last ten years
“By joining IBM, HashiCorp products can be made available to a much broader audience, allowing us to serve many more users and customers,” promises Armon Dadgar. Looking back at the beginnings of the company, particularly its creation in 2012, its CTO affirms that “The cloud landscape was very different from today. Mitchell (Hashimoto, editor's note) and I were first exposed to public clouds as amateurs, experimenting with start-up ideas, and then as as professional developers creating mission-critical applications. This experience clearly showed that automation is absolutely necessary for cloud infrastructure to be managed at scale.
IBM confirms its ambitions
The announcement is fully in line with IBM's strategy of investing deeply in hybrid cloud and AI, two technologies that the giant sees as “the most transformational for today’s customers.” A point that Arvind Krishna, CEO of IBM, did not fail to emphasize. “Enterprise customers are facing unprecedented expansion of infrastructure and applications across public and private clouds, as well as on-premises environments.”
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Arvind Krishna also believes that “Global enthusiasm for generative AI has exacerbated these challenges and CIOs and developers face dramatic complexity in their technology strategies.” Ultimately, the combination of IBM's portfolio and expertise with HashiCorp's capabilities should create “a complete hybrid cloud platform designed for the AI era.”
Robust product and customer portfolios now in the hands of IBM
If HashiCorp believes it has accomplished its original mission, namely to enable cloud automation in a multi-cloud world for a community of practitioners, there is still a long way to go and this will be done under the control from IBM. The HashiCorp product portfolio has grown significantly since the company's inception, today including Terraform, Vault, Boundary, Consul, Nomad, Packer, Vagrant and Waypoint. Products that were downloaded more than 450 million times last year, as attested by HashiCorp.
IBM plans to create synergies with its own portfolio, starting with the combination of Red Hat's Ansible Automation Platform configuration management and Terraform automation to “simplify application provisioning and configuration in hybrid cloud environments”. The American multinational also gets its hands on a sizable client portfolio: HashiCorp has more than 4,400 clients, including Bloomberg, Comcast, Deutsche Bank, GitHub, JP Morgan Chase, Starbucks and Vodafone. The offers developed by the company are also used by 85% of Fortune 500 companies.
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