IBM has announced it will acquire HashiCorp for $35 per share in cash or $6.4 billion to enable organizations to automate their hybrid and multi-cloud environments.
According to Arvind Krishna, IBM chairman and chief executive officer, “HashiCorp has a proven track record of enabling clients to manage the complexity of today’s infrastructure and application sprawl. Combining IBM’s portfolio and expertise with HashiCorp’s capabilities and talent will create a comprehensive hybrid cloud platform designed for the AI era.”
The acquisition of HashiCorp by IBM creates a comprehensive end-to-end hybrid cloud platform built for AI-driven complexity. The combination of each company’s portfolio and talent will deliver clients extensive application, infrastructure and security lifecycle management capabilities. HashiCorp is expected to drive significant synergies for IBM, including across multiple strategic growth areas like Red Hat, watsonx, data security, IT automation and Consulting.
The acquisition is also expected to deliver more comprehensive hybrid and multi-cloud offerings to enterprise clients. HashiCorp’s offerings, combined with IBM and Red Hat, will give clients a platform to automate the deployment and orchestration of workloads across evolving infrastructure including hyperscale cloud service providers, private clouds and on-prem environments.
This will enhance IBM’s ability to address the total cloud opportunity, which according to IDC had a TAM of $1.1 trillion in 2023, with a compound annual growth rate in the high teens through 2027.
HashiCorp boasts a roster of more than 4,400 clients, including Bloomberg, Comcast, Deutsche Bank, GitHub, J.P Morgan Chase, Starbucks and Vodafone.
The boards of directors of IBM and HashiCorp have both approved the transaction. The acquisition is subject to approval by HashiCorp shareholders, regulatory approvals and other customary closing conditions. The transaction is expected to close by the end of 2024.