IBM has just confirmed that it has completed a very important acquisition. A colossus like HashiCorpa company that offers tools and products that enable developers, operators and professionals to provision, secure, run and connect cloud computing infrastructures, joins the portfolio of Big Blue.
The value of the agreement is equal to 6.4 billion dollars and is clear evidence of how IBM intends to strengthen its role as an absolute protagonist in the cloud ibrido and in solutions based onartificial intelligencetwo market segments that are registering great interest and rapid growth.
Who is HashiCorp and what its flagship solution, Terraform, allows you to do
As mentioned previously, HashiCorp is a company focused on the design and creation of tools aimed at automating the provisioning, security, networking and other tasks in the modern IT environment. Founded in 2012 by Mitchell Hashimoto and Armon Dadgar, HashiCorp has become a point of reference in the infrastructure management through the concept of Infrastructure as Code (IaC), which aims to manage IT resources through coding.
The crown jewel of HashiCorp is Terraformplatform for creating, modifying and managing multiple “versions” of infrastructure in the form of code. The winning idea is to allow users to define the desired infrastructure using a configuration file. Also starting from this file, IT administrators can carry out the provisioning of infrastructure across different cloud providers (AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, etc.), as well as infrastructure on-premises.
The term provisioning in the context of IT it refers to the process of preparing and configuring computing resources for use by end users and applications. With this type of activity, the resources necessary to carry out certain activities and serve certain purposes are made available and functional.
A hybrid cloud platform is coming that combines IBM’s skills with those of HashiCorp
As IBM explains, IT administrators and developers are faced with a complexity dramatic impact on technological strategies of every company. The global interest that has arisen around the topic of artificial intelligence and the possibility of adapting generative models to the needs of the company (extending its skills with each company’s own business data) has literally exacerbated these challenges.
With the acquisition of HashiCorp, IBM’s goal is to combine its experience and rich portfolio with the skills and talent of HashiCorp’s engineers. The result of these efforts will be a hybrid cloud platform Completely designed for the age of artificial intelligence.
HashiCorp’s offerings help customers take one approach cloud-agnostichighly oriented towards multi-cloud managementcompleting IBM’s commitment to industrial collaboration within the developer community, simultaneously pushing the concept of cloud innovation and open source AI.
What are the reasons for IBM’s purchase of HashiCorp
The acquisition of HashiCorp leads, as we mentioned previously, to the creation of an end-to-end hybrid cloud platform built to simplify the implementation and deployment of even the most complex AI-based solutions. Users will thus be able to count on an approach that improves their performance life cycle management applications, infrastructure and security.
IBM evidently expects that HashiCorp solutions can enable the development of synergies in multiple strategic areas. Think about integration with the Red Hat platform, with IBM Watsonx, with the various tools for data security, IT automation and consultancy.
Following the acquisition, IBM will have the opportunity to offer business customers even more comprehensive hybrid and multi-cloud offerings. In particular, the approach used by HashiCorp, combined with the IBM and Red Hat proposals, will allow automating the release andworkload orchestration on constantly evolving infrastructures.
Furthermore, the economic benefits for IBM should be tangible from the second year after the closing of the HashiCorp asset acquisition agreement.
Recently, the alternative to Terraform called OpenTF was also born: the promoters of the project aim to remove the platform from specific commercial interests.
The opening image is provided by HashiCorp.