IBM completed the multi-billion-dollar Hasicorp acquisition two days after British anti-trust regulators gave the blessing.
An IBM spokesperson confirmed with TechCrunch on Tuesday that the US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) quietly greenlighted the acquisition just before the UK’s Competitive Markets Agency (CMA).
Today’s announcement comes after IBM first unveils its plans to pay $6.4 billion to Hashicorp, the enterprise software company most well-known for Terraform, a “infrastructure as code” tool for automating infrastructure provisioning and management across the cloud.
Terraform was once available under an open source license, but Hashicorp switched to its controversially own license in 2023 (which led to a community-driven fork called Opentofu). This license change has given Hashicorp a more attractive acquisition prospect, giving suitors more control over how terraform is being used in the industry.
Anyway, Terraform’s ability to help businesses deliver on-premises and across the cloud, making up the various hardware, software and network components needed to run applications and services is well suited to IBM strategies that have evolved from on-prem systems to cloud.
A big blue fly high
IBM is one of several legacy software companies riding the wave of AI and cloud computing, with Big Blue having earned an all-time high of over $240 billion this year. And with Hashicorp now under its wings, this will somehow move on to further strengthen the qualifications of the hybrid cloud.
“Organisations around the world are considering deploying modern hybrid cloud-enabled apps that require a significant scale to automated cloud infrastructure,” IBM Executive Rob Thomas said in a statement. “With this acquisition, IBM is committed to continuing its investment and growth in Hasicorp’s capabilities, and our aim is to inject Hasicorp technology into every data center, along with IBM’s global reach and R&D resources, a major Hasicorp technology.
The acquisition is also based on IBM’s $34 billion Red Hat purchase in 2019, as well as other substantial deals, including the $4.6 billion paid to Apptio in 2023.
IBM initially indicated that it was expecting to close the Hashcorp transaction by the end of 2024, but the red tape of the regulations held the situation. A filing with the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) last July revealed that the FTC was considering details of the planned merger, and the UK CMA continued its lawsuit in December.
This paved the way for IBM to close the deal within days as both the FTC and the CMA are on the way.
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