IBM wisely stopped trying to be a pure cloud infrastructure provider years ago, recognizing that it could never compete with the big three: amazon, Microsoft and Google. Since then, he has gone on to help IT departments manage complex hybrid environments, using his financial clout to acquire a portfolio of high-profile companies.
It started with the $34 billion acquisition of Red Hat in 2018, continued with the acquisition of Apptio last year, and continued on Wednesday when the company announced it would acquire cloud management provider HashiCorp for $6.4 billion. Dollars.
With HashiCorp, Big Blue gets a suite of cloud lifecycle management and security tools, and a business that is growing considerably faster than any of IBM's other businesses, although revenue is small by IBM standards : 155 million dollars last quarter, 15% more than the previous one. last year. That still makes it a healthy, growing business for IBM to add to its growing hybrid cloud toolset.
IBM CEO Arvind Krishna certainly sees the value of this piece for his company's hybrid strategy, and even included an ai reference for good measure. “HashiCorp has a proven track record in enabling customers to manage the complexity of today's infrastructure and application expansion. “Combining IBM’s portfolio and expertise with HashiCorp’s capabilities and talent will create a comprehensive hybrid cloud platform designed 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 be 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 misusing Terraform. open source code when he created the OpenTofu fork. Now that the company is part of IBM, it will be interesting to see if they continue this line of thinking.
It's worth noting that Red Hat also made headlines last year when it changed the terms of its open source license, which also caused consternation in the open source community. Perhaps these companies are a good fit, both from a software perspective and from their changing views on open source.
This same week, the company presented a new platform concept with the launch of infrastructure cloud, a concept that should fit perfectly within IBM's hybrid cloud product portfolio. While they didn't add much in terms of functionality, they unified the offerings under a single umbrella, making it easier for sales and marketing to present to customers.
If IBM treats HashiCorp similarly to Red Hat, the company would maintain its independence within the IBM family of products. AVOA, a research firm run by former CIO Tim Crawford, says the company would be wise to remain neutral.
“My reservation would be if IBM moves away from Hashicorp's neutral stance in working with multiple cloud providers and focuses on IBM Cloud. I suspect that would not be the case, as IBM has recently shown that they are more open with other cloud providers,” Crawford wrote in a recent blog post.
HashiCorp was founded in 2012 and raised nearly $350 million before going public in 2021.
