The move puts to rest HashiCorp’s tumultuous tenure in the public markets and firms up IBM’s leadership position as one of the leading providers of cloud management tools. IBM already owns Red Hat, which it purchased for $34 billion in 2019.
“e believe the deal makes a lot of strategic sense for both companies, with IBM buttressing its growing infrastructure software portfolio with popular complementary tools , while HashiCorp will gain access to a seasoned go-to-market motion.”On the plus side for IBM, HashiCorp is considered a leading provider of tools to cloud developers and infrastructure managers. Its infrastructure as code product, Terraform, is an industry standard.
With HashiCorp losing its independent status, it may shine the light on alternative IaC products, such as the open-source project OpenTofu and startup Pulumi, which are becoming popular alternatives to HashiCorp in the IaC space. "HashiCorp struggled to execute on open-source commercialization, and eventually turned their back on their heritage with their BSL license last year,” Joe Duffy, founder CEO of IaC company Pulumi, wrote to me in an email. “Hashi's go to market similarly struggled — indeed Pulumi spent a minuscule fraction compared to them this past quarter on sales/marketing, and yet grew customers by more than double, to reach over 2,500 customers .