IBM enters hybrid cloud with $6.4 billion acquisition of cloud management vendor HashiCorp

Big Blue IBM provides a variety of servers and management software and is one of the major suppliers in the field of cloud infrastructure. However, IBM itself does not have a prominent performance in the public cloud field and cannot compete with Amazon AWS, Microsoft Azure and Google GCP.

However, after all, IBM's business development has been quite good in recent years, so it has relatively sufficient funds on its books. It can expand its business scope through acquisitions and gain a foothold in some fields.

IBM spent US$34 billion to acquire Red Hat in 2018 and Apptio in 2023. This week, IBM announced that it would acquire cloud management provider HashiCorp for US$6.4 billion.

Founded in 2012, HashiCorp mainly provides a series of cloud management suites for cloud computing platforms, enterprises, developers and security personnel to help customers configure, protect, operate and connect cloud computing infrastructure.

IBM believes that through the acquisition of HashiCorp, it can combine IBM's product portfolio and intellectual property with HashiCorp's technical capabilities and talent base to create a comprehensive hybrid cloud platform designed for the artificial intelligence era.

The number of artificial intelligence companies is increasing rapidly. These companies need to build internal cloud computing infrastructure. At this time, they may need the cloud management suite provided by HashiCorp. IBM can also provide its own server products to these customers.

Therefore, in the end, IBM may not focus on competing with the three giants in the public cloud field. Instead, it will advance in the enterprise cloud segment and allow more companies to use the servers and management suites provided by IBM.

Finally, some disputes between IBM and HashiCorp need to be mentioned:

HashiCorp changed the license of the TerraForm tool last year, that is, from being completely open source to having various additional conditions. After that, the open source community launched a replacement OpenTofu, but HashiCorp accused the community of creating OpenTofu for abusing Terraform's open source code.

Red Hat also modified its open source license last year, causing panic in the open source community. At least currently, IBM does not seem to be an active participant in the open source field. Therefore, after IBM acquired HashiCorp, it is estimated that open source alternatives such as OpenTofu may also be in trouble.