IBM has officially completed its acquisition of HashiCorp, the cloud infrastructure and security automation pioneer, in a deal worth around $6.4 billion. But before we dive in, let’s refresh our readers’ understanding of the background.
In mid-August 2023, HashiCorp shocked the open-source community by announcing that it was changing the licensing model for Terraform, one of its flagship products.
You might not have even heard of it if you’re a regular computer user. But if you work in the DevOps space, you know that Terraform (a de facto standard for Infrastructure as Code provisioning) is the tool every professional lives and breathes.
Anyway, the result? A free and open-source fork called OpenTofu quickly emerged, and it has gained significant traction to this day. Then, eight months later, came the big news—HashiCorp was set to be acquired by tech giant IBM for a staggering $6.4 billion.
As of yesterday, the deal is officially closed, placing HashiCorp alongside other major IBM acquisitions—most notably, Red Hat—in Big Blue’s portfolio.
In light of this, Armon Dadgar, HashiCorp CTO and co-founder, highlighted this alignment, saying:
I’m excited for HashiCorp to join the IBM family, where there is clear alignment on the vision of enabling hybrid infrastructure for the world’s biggest enterprises.
I tend to agree with that statement. In addition to Terraform, by acquiring HashiCorp, IBM also brings other iconic DevOps tools under its wing—essential components of modern cloud computing, such as Vault, Consul, Nomad, Vagrant, and Packer. Combined with its existing ownership of Red Hat, the company has all the key factors in place to become a leader in the cloud solutions market.
Of course, some of these tools are expected to be closely integrated into Red Hat’s products soon, especially since there have already been statements pointing in that direction. For example, Terraform’s infrastructure provisioning complements Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform’s application deployment, creating a seamless environment for hybrid and multi-cloud services.
Similarly, combining HashiCorp Vault with Red Hat OpenShift can deliver robust secrets management for distributed applications, meeting the security needs of enterprises that juggle both on-premises and public cloud resources.
It remains to be seen how these tools will evolve under the IBM umbrella. As strong supporters of open-source software, we sincerely hope that their trajectory won’t change and that they will continue to be accessible and free for all developers who want to use them—just as they have been until now.
For more details on finalizing the deal, see IBM’s official announcement here and HashiCorp’s announcement here.
