Did IBM make a $6.4 billion blunder by buying HashiCorp?
Opinion In some ways, IBM paying a cool $6.4 billion for HashiCorp makes perfect sense. HashiCorp's infrastructure-as-code (IaC) tool Terraform is very popular and would work well with Red Hat Ansible. And, yes, I've heard the joke about how if you put them together, you'd get "Terrible."
The business case is also clear. According to the business-to-business market analysis company 6Sense, Terraform has a 32.02 percent market share in the configuration-management category. Number two? Ansible, with 31.35 percent.
As IBM CFO Jim Kavanaugh said in IBM's last earnings call, "The powerful 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."
I can also easily see other HashiCorp programs, such as its secrets manager Vault, the portable virtual software development platform creator Vagrant, and the machine image builder Packer, being incorporated into the Red Hat line. All good news, right? Wrong.
