IBM today said it would buy multi-cloud infrastructure automation company HashiCorp for $6.4 billion.
Once the deal closes, expected by the end of 2024, IBM is projected to further integrate Hashicorp automation technology into its Red Hat, watsonx, data security, IT automation and consulting businesses. IBM uses Hashicorp technology in many of its cloud offerings already.
HashiCorp’s products include the widely deployed Terraform package which lets customers automatically provision infrastructure network, virtual or other components across multiple cloud providers and on-premises environments.
The company also offers Vault, Nomad, Consul which are deployed to automate cloud infrastructure provisioning, secure secret management, resource orchestration and service networking across multiple cloud platforms.
In addition, HashiCorp has technology agreements with most major cloud providers including Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud, Micorosft Azure and more.
“HashiCorp is company we have partnered with for a long time and believe is a tremendous strategic fit with IBM,” Arvind Krishna, IBM chairman and chief executive officer, said during a conference call. “Enterprise clients are wrestling with an unprecedented expansion and infrastructure applications across public and private clouds as well as on prem environments,” Krishna said.
“As generative AI deployment accelerates alongside traditional workloads, developers are working with increasingly heterogeneous, dynamic and complex infrastructure strategies. HashiCorp has a proven track record of helping clients manage the complexity of today’s infrastructure by automating, orchestrating and securing hybrid and multi cloud environments.”
HashiCorp will be a strategic addition to the IBM portfolio, extending Red Hat’s hybrid cloud capabilities to provide end to end automated infrastructure and security lifecycle management, Krishna said. “TerraForm is the industry standard for infrastructure automation for these environments with security top of mind for every enterprise,” Krishna said.
For example, the combination of Red Hat’s Ansible Automation Platform’s configuration management and Terraform’s automation will simplify provisioning and configuration of applications across hybrid cloud environments, IBM stated.
The HashiCorp deal would be IBM’s third of the year and 13th since 2023. The company’s 2018 acquisition of software company Red Hat for $34 billion, including debt, remains its biggest buyout till date, according to a Reuters report.
Dave McJannet, HashiCorp’s CEO, will report to Rob Thomas, IBM’s senior vice president in charge of software, if the deal goes through, according to IBM.