IBM completes HashiCorp acquisition after regulatory approval

IBM has completed its acquisition of HashiCorp and unveiled plans to integrate the company's automation and security technology into its cloud offerings.

The $6.4 billion deal - which is being finalized a couple of months later than expected - was held up by the need to gain approval from the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) and the US Federal Trade Commission (FTC).

HashiCorp is best-known for its Terraform platform, which provides lifecycle management for infrastructure and security through a single workflow, creating a system of record for hybrid and multi-cloud environments.

Customers can automatically provision infrastructure, network, and virtual components across multiple cloud providers and on-premises environments.

Following the acquisition, the plan is to integrate HashiCorp’s automation technology into IBM's Red Hat, watsonx, data security, IT automation, and consulting businesses.

"Organizations globally are looking to deploy modern, hybrid cloud-ready apps, which require automated cloud infrastructure at significant scale," said Rob Thomas, senior vice president, IBM Software, and chief commercial officer.

"With this acquisition, IBM is committed to continuing to invest in and grow the HashiCorp capabilities, and together, with HashiCorp's leading technology and extensive developer community, IBM's global reach and R&D resources, our aim is to infuse HashiCorp technology in every data center."

HashiCorp serves more than 4,400 clients, including Bloomberg, Comcast, Deutsche Bank, GitHub, JP Morgan Chase, Starbucks, and Vodafone, along with 85% of Fortune 500 companies.

"HashiCorp has been helping the world's largest enterprises succeed in hybrid and multi-cloud environments for over a decade. We've seen the cloud grow from its origins, and have participated first-hand in the change it has brought to the industry," said Dave McJannet, CEO of HashiCorp.

"With IBM's history, global scale, and customer relationships, HashiCorp can now expand our reach to help our community of customers, practitioners, and partners automate, secure, and optimize their cloud infrastructure, providing an end-to-end platform for hybrid environments."

IBM touts HashiCorp platform synergy

There's a powerful synergy between Terraform and the Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform, according to IBM, with Terraform automating foundational infrastructure creation across multiple cloud providers, and Ansible automating application configurations and middleware deployments on top.

Meanwhile, there are plans for HashiCorp's Vault, a tool that provides an encrypted environment for storing secrets.

Combined with Red Hat OpenShift, Vault will provide secrets management and security capabilities across hybrid cloud environments, with Terraform enabling the building and deployment of IBM Z applications in hybrid cloud environments.

"Integrating Terraform for provisioning with Ansible for configuration management will enable an end-to-end approach to infrastructure automation as code, while integrating Terraform with Cloudability will bring native FinOps capabilities to manage and optimize cost at scale," said Armon Dadgar, CTO and Co-founder of HashiCorp.

"Vault integration with OpenShift, Ansible, and Guardium will bring world-class secrets management to those platforms and reduce the integration burden on end users."

The deal is just the latest in a series of acquisitions by IBM aimed at bolstering its hybrid cloud offerings, including Red Hat in 2019 and Apptio in 2023.

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