Wasn't on my bingo card, that's for sure.<p>Say what you will about big blue, they repeatedly seem to know who to acquire in order to buy themselves another 10 years of relevance.
This seemed like an inevitability given the reliance on enterprise customers and the move to maximise the revenue from Terraform with the recent license change. They have made a round of layoffs, so at least some cost saving has already been done to make it more appealing for a sale. The main challenge from an acquisition like this will be maintaining the community around terraform providers, if that drops off, i'm not sure there will be as many developers coming into the hashicorp ecosystem.
Mitchell, one of the co founders, left HashiCorp in December 2023 [1]<p>It’s either terrible timing (missed on more money?) or he knew about it and decided months in advance that it’s not worth the trouble of staying on (ie, look at the aftermath of the RedHat and IBM acquisition).<p>[1] <a href="https://www.hashicorp.com/blog/mitchell-reflects-as-he-departs-hashicorp" rel="nofollow">https://www.hashicorp.com/blog/mitchell-reflects-as-he-depar...</a>
Back when Mitchell left, I commented the following "I hope Hashicorp will manage to find its stride and not end up as some bullet point in a long "solutions" portfolio of some software conglomerate.".<p>Hearing about the intention to sell and now IBM... well, that sucks.
Reuters references a WSJ article. That article (gift link) is IBM Nears Deal for Cloud-Software Provider -- <a href="https://www.wsj.com/business/deals/ibm-nears-deal-for-cloud-software-provider-cf146448?st=r4dbdpqje4o954f&reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink" rel="nofollow">https://www.wsj.com/business/deals/ibm-nears-deal-for-cloud-...</a>
If you were looking to standardize on IaC today, after reading this news - would you go with Terraform or OpenTofu? I honestly can't get a good read on how this will affect the future of Terraform.
I hope that's not true (or falls through). I have a good friend that works for HashiCorp. He's 42, and will undoubtedly be on the chopping block.
It is hard to figure out what IBM is anymore
and their profile /strategy is.<p>They make totally awesome mainframes, which are spectacularly expensive
and tends to be existing customers updating than new companies
buying them.
All the research and engineering that they put into the mainframes is astounding.
They remain a critical part of a vast number of financial transactions in the world.<p>I keep hoping companies will discover that they are really great
for a few things
But they are certainly not fashionable, and it does not appear that IBM
has much interest in making them fashionable.<p>They have the iSeries which I believe is the successor to the AS/400.
That was one amazing and utterly reliable machine.
But again, that was 20 years ago or more since I touched them.
But they are certainly not fashionable, and it does not appear that IBM
has much interest in making them fashionable.<p>Then they have a research division that used to do great things.
They may still be I just have not followed it much.
I do know that they are investing a lot into research about Quantum
chips. (or at least I think so)<p>DB/2 used to be a great database system.
It may still be, but I have had no exposure to it in over a decade.
It does not show up often in DBMS comparisons.
But it is certainly not fashionable, and it does not appear that IBM
has much interest in making it fashionable.<p>They have their cloud services
But it is certainly not fashionable, and it does not appear that IBM
has much interest in making it fashionable or ????
I know they are selling hybrid solutions for people with mainframe
to run some things in the IBM cloud.<p>They have at least 4 operating systems. z/OS, AIX and RedHat
(well that one is quite different) and whatever the iSeries run
these days.<p>The must have a research park somewhere that invents new was to do
licensing and making things even more expensive.
Possibly some cooperating with Oracle :p<p>They have whatever their consulting arms is called now.
I have been terribly disappointed with the consultants i have interacted with
from there but I may have been unlucky.<p>They have RedHat and now (maybe) Hasicorp.<p>RedHat+Hasicorp goes into the cloud?
+ adds leverage to their consulting business.<p>What is the overall strategy though.
They have so many different things but they dont seem to push them in a collective
way into something new and wonderful.
I contacted IBM regarding looking RH services, I couldn't even get someone to setup a meeting to sell me something after weeks with a sales drone. Purely inept.<p>Death to anything IBM.
Now announced publicly as finalized: <a href="https://newsroom.ibm.com/2024-04-24-IBM-to-Acquire-HashiCorp-Inc-Creating-a-Comprehensive-End-to-End-Hybrid-Cloud-Platform" rel="nofollow">https://newsroom.ibm.com/2024-04-24-IBM-to-Acquire-HashiCorp...</a>
Soon, from the acquired party:<p>"Our incredible journey" ...<p><a href="https://ourincrediblejourney.tumblr.com/" rel="nofollow">https://ourincrediblejourney.tumblr.com/</a><p>In earlier years, many of them literally had those words in their final blog posts or emails to their users.<p>Now some of them seem to have got wise to the Tumblog above, so are changing their words, though not their meaning.