IBM has been given the green light by regulators to acquire HashiCorp. It is putting more than $6 billion on the table.
The ball is in the court: IBM officially announces its acquisition of cloud infrastructure management provider HashiCorp Inc with a press release. IBM announced the transaction last year, and now that it has received approval from regulators, the acquisition is complete.
The acquisition involves $6.4 billion, with IBM offering a chunk above the $4.9 billion HashiCorp was worth at the time of the transaction. Since the initial acquisition reports, the company’s market capitalization had risen more than 18 percent.
The takeover did not come without a fight. The first resistance came from HashiCorp’ s shareholders. The last party that could put IBM between the wheels was the British regulator, which started an investigation. Two days ago it gave the green light and the red carpet was rolled out.
Opensource tools
HashiCorp is an infrastructure management provider that enables customers to set up and manage their infrastructures in the cloud. The company offers several open source tools for this purpose, but it has been scaling back its open source philosophy for some time. This software portfolio is led by Terraform, an automated tool for setting up cloud and other hardware resources. Recently, the company expanded its Cloud Platform with a managed version of its Terraform infrastructure automation tool.
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With HashiCorp under its wing, IBM aims to expand its hybrid cloud strategy. “Organizations around the world are looking for modern, hybrid cloud-ready apps that require automated cloud infrastructure at significant scale,” the company said in a comment to TechCrunch. IBM is not averse to acquisitions to thicken its portfolio. The largest acquisition the company accomplished remains by a wide margin that of Red Hat in 2019: it put $34 billion on the table at the time.
This article originally appeared on April 24, 2024 and has been updated with the latest information.