Well, it was nice while it lasted! HashiCorp always felt like a company made by actual engineers, not "bean counters". Now it will just be another cog in the IBM machine, slowly grinding it down, removing everything attractive, just like RedHat and CentOS.
Hopefully this will create a new wave off innovation, and someone will create something to replace the monopoly on IaC that IBM now owns.
A lot of the people I respected from Heroku went there, glad they got a chance to use their skills to build something useful and profitable; glader still that they got their payout.
Sadly I echo your sentiment about the future, as someone who has heard second-hand about the quality of work at modern Redhat.
I am wondering how many more rounds of consolidation are left until there is no more space to innovate and we only have ossified rent-seeking entities in the IT space.
Hashi code, such as Terraform, was (is) an amazing example of a good reference Go codebase. It was very hard for me to get into Go because, outside of the language trivia and hype, it was hard to learn about the patterns and best practices needed for building even a mid-sized application.
I see this as an opportunity. Not to replace HashiCorp's products - OpenTofu and OpenBao are snapping up most of the mindshare for now - but to build another OSS-first developer darling company.
i can only speak to the early days (joined around 11 folks), but the engineers then were top tier and hungry to build cool shit. A few years later (as an outsider) seemed innovation had slowed substantially. i still know there are great folks there, but has felt like HashiCorp’s focus lately has been packaging up all their tools into a cohesive all-in-one solution (this was actually Atlas in the early days) and figuring out their story around service lifecycle with experiments like Waypoint (Otto in the early days). IBM acquisition is likely best outcome.
Honestly, Mitchell should still be very proud of what he built and the legacy of Hashicorp. Sure, the corp has taken a different direction lately but thanks to the licenses of the Hashicorp family of software, it's almost entirely available for forking and re-homing by the community that helped build it up to this point. E.g. opentofu and openbao. I'm sure other projects may follow and the legacy will endure, minus (or maybe not, you never know) contributions from the company they built to try to monetize and support that vision.
My personal opinion is it was a company for crack monkeys. Consul, Vault and Packer have been nothing but pain and misery for me over the last few years. The application of these technologies has been nothing but a loss of ROI and sanity on a promise.
And don't get me started on Terraform, which is a promise but rarely delivers. It's bad enough that a whole ecosystem appeared around it (like terragrunt) to patch up the holes in it.
It was this, but hasn’t been for a couple of years at least. The culture really shifted once it was clear the pivot to becoming a SaaS-forward company wasn’t taking off. As soon as the IPO happened and even a little bit before, it felt like the place was being groomed down from somewhere unique and innovative to a standardized widget that would be attractive to enterprise-scale buyers like VMware or IBM.
I think it's ok to tell this story now. Long long time ago when I was still at DO, I tried to buy HashiCorp. Well, I use "tried to buy" very loosely. It was when we were both pretty small startups, Joonas our Dir. Eng at the time was really into their tooling, thought it was very good plus Armon and Mitch are fantastic engineers. So I flew out from NYC to SF to meet with them "to talk". Well, I had no idea how to go about trying to buy a company and they didn't really seem that interested in joining us, so we stood around a grocery store parking lot shuffling our feet talking about how great Mitch and Armon are at building stuff and then I flew home. I think that's about as loosely as it gets when it comes to buying a company. Probably would have been a cool combo tho, who knows. Either way, they're great guys, super proud of them. <3
I was in a similar position in a company that _might_ have been able to make a good enough offer, but never could convince the brass how amazing a company it is and I never got any traction.
Disappointing to hear about this, Hashicorp was an amazing company. C’est la vie…
Hashi never sold me on the integration of their products, which was my primary issue with not selecting them. Each is independently useful, and there is no nudge to combine them for a 1+1=3 feature set.
Kubernetes was the chasm. Owning the computing platform is the core of utilizing Vault and integrating it.
The primary issue was that there was never a "One Click" way to create an environment using Vagarent, Packer, Nomad, Vault, Waypoint, and Boundry for a local developer-to-prod setup. Because of this, everyone built bespoke, and each component was independently debated and selected. They could have standardized a pipeline and allowed new companies to get off the ground quickly. Existing companies could still pick and choose their pieces. On both, you sell support contracts.
I hope they do well at IBM. Their cloud services' strategy is creating a holistic platform. So, there is still a chance Hashi products will get the integration they deserve.
FWIW, "HashiStack" was a much discussed, much promised, but never delivered thing. I think the way HashiCorp siloed their products into mini-fiefdoms (see interactions between the Vault and Terraform teams over the Terraform Vault provider) prevented a lot of cross-product integration, which is ironic for how "anti-silo" their go to market is.
There's probably an alternate reality where something like HashiStack became this generation's vSphere, and HashiCorp stayed independent and profitable.
I was an extremely early user and owner of a very large-scale Vault deployment on Kubernetes. Worked with a few of their sales engineers closely on it - was always told early on that although they supported vault on kubernetes via a helm chart, they did not recommend using it on anything but EC2 instances (because of "security" which never really made sense their reasoning). During every meeting and conference I'd ask about Kubernetes support, gave many suggestions, feedback, showed the problems we encountered - don't know if the rep was blowing smoke up my ass but a few times he told me that we were doing things they hadn't thought of yet.
Fast forward several years, I saw a little while ago that they don't recommend the only method of vault running on EC2, fully support kubernetes, and I saw several of my ideas/feedback listed almost verbatim in the documentation I saw (note, I am not accusing them of plagiarism - these were very obvious complaints that I'm sure I wasn't the only one raising after a while).
It always surprised me how these conversations went. "Well we don't really recommend kubernetes so we won't support (feature)."
Me: "Well the majority of your customers will want to use it this way, so....."
Just was a very frustrating process, and a frustrating product - I love what it does, but there are an unbelievable amount of footguns laden in the enterprise version, not to mention it has a way of worming itself irrevocably into your infrastructure, and due to extremely weird/obfuscated pricing models I'm fairly certain people are waking up to surprise bills nowadays. They also rug pulled some OSS features, particularly MFA login, which kind of pissed me off. The product (in my view) is pretty much worthless to a company without that.
Back in 2015 I discovered a security issue with some Dell software[1]. I remember vividly getting an email about a job opportunity based entirely on this from a company with a strange name, that after some googling made a thing called Vagrant. They seemed super nice but I was far too young and immature to properly evaluate the opportunity, so after a few emails I ghosted them out of fear of the unknown. In 2015 they had 50 employees and had just raised a 10 million series A[2].
Regardless of various things that have happened, or things that could have been, the company has pushed the envelope with some absolute bangers and we are all better for it, directly or indirectly.
Regardless of what the general opinion is of Hashicorp’s future post-IBM, they made an impact and that should be celebrated, not decried or sorrowed over for lack of a perceived picture perfect ending.
I guess you're not active in hacker news around 2013 because vagrant was absolutely popular here a long time ago. Mitchell Hashimoto showed up a lot too when we're talking about vagrant back then. If only you had procrastinated more you might ended up as employee #51 :)
I expected this when the terraform license changed. Not IBM specifically but it was obvious they weren't interested/ able to continue with their founding vision.
Hashicorp had a $14 billion IPO in Dec 2021 and was trading at ~$4.7 billion right before the acquisition announcement. At that point it doesn't matter what the company or its founders want or what their long term vision is. Shareholders are in charge and heads are going to roll if the price doesn't get back up quick by any means necessary.
Certainly an interesting turn of events. I really enjoy using Terraform (and Terraform cloud) for work but the license changes made me cautious to integrate anymore.
IBM has its mitts into finance, defence, aerospace -- and these industries generally stick to IBM / IBM sanctioned products. So with IBM selling Vault / Boundary (in particular) they will get better adoption.
It's a shame that HashiCorp gave up. The govt bans foreign competition like Tiktok and in house competition don't have the stamina. Doesn't bode well for capitalism.
Well folks are already migrating from Terraform to OpenTofu. I am sure similar open source projects for other HashiCorp's products unencumbered with IBM business model will be out pretty soon.
So all in all I think another big win for open source even if little indirectly.
I think typical premium is about 20% for acquisitions.
The amount may have been negotiated prior to this month's downturn, which Hashicorp was hit pretty hard by (they had about a 10% fall based on what I'm seeing).
It's really sad to me that Hashicorp never found a monetization model that worked.
100% of the companies I worked for over the last 6 years all used Terraform, there really wasn't anything else out there, and though there were complaints, it generally worked.
It really provided a lot of value to us, and we definitely would have been willing to pay.
Though every time we asked, we wanted commitment to update the AWS/GCP providers in a timely fashion for new features, and they would never commit and tried to shove some hosted terraform service down our throats, which we would never agree to anyway due to IP/security concerns.
Perhaps an open source fork of Terraform, where the cloud providers themselves maintain the provider repos, is the correct end-state. AWS started doing that in the last few years, assigning engineering resources to the open source TF provider repos.
That way, the profit beneficiaries bear the brunt of the development/maintenance costs.
I wonder how this will work with Red Hat. Traditionally, Red Hat and HashiCorp competed more directly than other IBM portfolio products, fighting over the same customer dollars.
Nomad has a remarkably strong community for it's size. I'm almost positive it will continue to live in some format, even if completely hard-forked.
I know if nobody else does anything I will do something myself, personally.
I love Kubernetes, however I feel like things like Nomad and Mesos have a space to exist in as well. Nomad especially holds a special place in my tech-heart. :)
technically, couldn't have IBM have hired Mitch when he was still doing vagrant ?
and put him in a closet somewhere. Given how Mitch, cranks out products -- could technically been cheaper than 6.4bn but then again IBM ain't hurting for cash.
Here's hoping they don't run great tools like Consul and Nomad into the ground somehow. If I'm ever forced to ditch Nomad and work with a pile of strung-together components like k8s I might just quit tech altogether.
I wonder if this may mean we will see the Terraform dogmatic approach to declining to implement much requested functionality in the name of "it doesn't fit our ideals" go by the wayside. I hope so, otherwise, OpenTofu here I come; or well, I'm sure someone's got a ML infra tool in the works by now.
I always have mixed feelings when a software company like this grabs their bag and leaves the community that helped build them, high and dry; good for them but still bad for everyone else nine out of ten times.
So long, and thanks for all the time we spend maintaining and fixing our Terraform code rather than just deploying an instance manually once. (It's been great for my job security!)
If this accelerates migration away from Terraform towards a standard, open, IaC platform, then it's a good thing. Something like the JSON version of Terraform that can be generated by different tools, but an open standard instead.
Be "interesting" to see what happens to the recently-renamed Terraform Cloud (now Hashicorp Cloud Platform Terraform :eyeroll:)
Edited to add: I'm guessing the feature I want added to the terraform language server is never going to happen now. Terraform's language server doesn't support registries inside Terraform Cloud, it doesn't know how to read the token in your terraformrc. bleh.
So basically you want OpenTofu. It's open source, you can make it do whatever you want, and there's a >0% chance your PRs will get accepted (compared to with HashiCorp)
Not unexpected, I saw a comment a ways back when they started with the BSL stuff that it had nothing to do with terraform, but was a response to IBM selling Vault.
IBM is trying to increase its "AI revenue" through acquisitions, a standard MBA playbook move (although analysts see through this and often ask specifically for "organic" revenue instead to tease that apart from revenue via acquisitions).
In the past, IBM was a technology leader, and probably still has substantial talent excellent inhouse, but from what I'm hearing it has become less appreciative of its researchers and engineers: for instance, my IBM friends lost any patenting activity related bonuses already several years ago.
Also, the Watson debacle (trying to monetize the Watson brand and the (impressive) Watson Jeopardy challenge results by quickly acquiring a bunch of stuff, only to then sell it as "our Watson AI technology") didn't help bolster its reputation, but rather harmed it further.
Companies like IBM and HP should go back to the roots, value science and engineering, take on bold blue-sky projects (don't leave those only to Musk!), and lead by example. Perhaps this could happen, but only with an engineer-scientist at the top instead of professional managers or bean counters (I'm not attacking the perormance of any individual here as I have not been following recent leadership activities of either company recently).
It is unlikely, IMHO, that an acquired company can change the culture of the acquirer. The only time I've seen this happening was Nokia benefitting Microsoft's culture, but that's because they made Nokia's CEO Microsoft's CEO, which is not going to happen with any likelihood in IBM's case.
IBM is a finance company with a tech brand. Business units are black (profitable) or red. They buy them, juice their profits, eventually they extract too much, they turn red. They bundle a few husks together, sell them off eg. Lenovo, or IPO them eg. Kyndryl.
Question: Is the tldr of companies like these that they sell enterprise server software? And often own the hardware too (data centers)? And then sell a bunch of consulting services on top of that to Fortune 500s and governments?
It's tempting to think "How are these guys even relevant anymore?" but IBM's making $60B+ a year with over $10B cash on hand, apparently from mostly "consulting services".
For a lot of developers including me, I never think about IBM or HashiCorp (or Oracle, SAP, etc.) and it's hard to imagine why someone would want to use their software compared to something newer, friendlier, cheaper, and probably faster. Is it just relationships?
Just curious how customers are actually getting value from an IBM or a HashiCorp or an Oracle.
Terraform does help with managing medium-large fleets, and a lot of special sauce is the structured types corresponding to cloud platforms (dubbed "providers") and the different services they offer. You could write your own configuration language and launcher but Terraform has been tested against many setups and can manage rolling restarts and other deployment methods. It's modular so you can define the configuration of a single server and then say "bring up 20 of these, use this docker image, name them thus," etc.
Vault for securely storing keys is also a convenient system component.
Both can be spun up in production without having to go through Hashicorp directly, but they also offer a service for managing the current state of the deployment (some aspects of the system are not queried at runtime and must be kept in a lock file of sorts, and coordinated with others doing any production changes). Some teams will coordinate using an S3 folder or some other ACL'd shared storage instead of relying on Hashicorp Cloud.
I find it's the closest thing to a public version of the service management tools I grew used to within Google, and it has been a driving force for the DevOps movement. I think something else could come along and do it better but it does seem like a lot of upkeep to retain parity with all the cloud services' products. I hope OpenTofu is successful, competition helps.
12x multiple for a Cloud SaaS company is not overpriced typically. I was surprised at this low multiple. Could be due to the current economic situation. And also the licensing changes, lack of product moat contributing in the wrong time.
Once again, thank you 'mitchellh for Vagrant, I'm sure you have heard this many times before but it really changed the way we worked for the better in every way.
I left Red Hat a bit after the IBM acquisition, and in my experience the management bullshittery was encroaching about a year after the deal closed. I hear their sales team are all frustrated and leaving due to IBM’s interference in Red Hat deals.
Contrary to the HN narrative, pretty OK. Not perfect, I have complaints, but most of them aren't related to IBM specifically.
IBM doesn't assert their will upon Red Hat anywhere near as strongly as HN seems to think they do and in particular the whole story about IBM killing CentOS is BS.
Hashicorp does so much more than terraform, but I don’t think OpenTofu is better than terraform. I’m not sure that was ever really an interesting issue, however, I think the main competition to terraform was/is things like Bicep.
I know the decision makers in our shop spent quite a lot of time deciding between the two. Finally decided on bicep after a number of what has probably been the most boring workshops I’ve ever attended. I’m fairly certain they are very happy with that decision now though. Not so much because big blue is evil, but because now we’re only beholden to one evil (Microsoft) and not two.
I don’t actually think Microsoft or IBM are evil. They are just not ideal from an European enterprise perspective because they are subject to an increasing amount of anti-non-eu legalisation and national/internal security issues.
This type of comment appears here every time the name IBM shows up, but it is more symptomatic, of the bubble a part of HN lives on.
Think every core IT infra of most of the developed world countries, most of the ebanking and core messaging infra of your large banks and insurance companies, plus billions per year in consulting services revenue.
As far as I can tell, the vast majority of the universe is completely incompetent with IT, but needs a lot of boring things done.
If you're a shipyard, an oil company, a bank, an automaker, etc. you still need software to manage things like inventory, employees, logistics, and similar, and you have zero expertise to do it in-house. They also have zero expertise to find a qualified vendor.
IBM is essentially a large bank with a side business of tech. IBM is known for financially complex deals that are highly lucrative. They make their money by taking advantage of inefficiencies in the largest enterprises purchasing and technology teams.
That's alright. HashiCorp stuff was 2nd tier compared to any offerings from the cloud providers themselves just because those providers' own solutions would get preference (obviously!). And cloud is the environment for 95% of app development these days.
If HashiCorp stuff is destined to die, something else will eventually rise to fill its niche if it's still valuable.
You can always count on technology to churn for no good reason.
To avoid sounding completely pessimestic: don't discount an IBM comeback either, for the same churning reasons.
Some comments were deferred for faster rendering.
dang|1 year ago
IBM nearing a buyout deal for HashiCorp, source says - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40135303 - April 2024 (170 comments)
calgoo|1 year ago
Hopefully this will create a new wave off innovation, and someone will create something to replace the monopoly on IaC that IBM now owns.
jbm|1 year ago
Sadly I echo your sentiment about the future, as someone who has heard second-hand about the quality of work at modern Redhat.
I am wondering how many more rounds of consolidation are left until there is no more space to innovate and we only have ossified rent-seeking entities in the IT space.
rank0|1 year ago
HashiCorp had already been sold out since waaaay before this acquisition and I also don’t understand why their engineers are seen as “special”…
renegade-otter|1 year ago
jnsaff2|1 year ago
IDK about this, in 2018 I was in a position to pay for their services. They asked for stupid amount of money and got none because they asked so much.
Can't remember what the exact numbers were but but it felt like ElasticSearch or Oracle.
tithe|1 year ago
cedws|1 year ago
mootpt|1 year ago
andrewstuart2|1 year ago
sureglymop|1 year ago
cjk2|1 year ago
And don't get me started on Terraform, which is a promise but rarely delivers. It's bad enough that a whole ecosystem appeared around it (like terragrunt) to patch up the holes in it.
skywhopper|1 year ago
pjmlp|1 year ago
neom|1 year ago
berniedurfee|1 year ago
Disappointing to hear about this, Hashicorp was an amazing company. C’est la vie…
ClassAndBurn|1 year ago
Kubernetes was the chasm. Owning the computing platform is the core of utilizing Vault and integrating it.
The primary issue was that there was never a "One Click" way to create an environment using Vagarent, Packer, Nomad, Vault, Waypoint, and Boundry for a local developer-to-prod setup. Because of this, everyone built bespoke, and each component was independently debated and selected. They could have standardized a pipeline and allowed new companies to get off the ground quickly. Existing companies could still pick and choose their pieces. On both, you sell support contracts.
I hope they do well at IBM. Their cloud services' strategy is creating a holistic platform. So, there is still a chance Hashi products will get the integration they deserve.
candiddevmike|1 year ago
There's probably an alternate reality where something like HashiStack became this generation's vSphere, and HashiCorp stayed independent and profitable.
JohnMakin|1 year ago
Fast forward several years, I saw a little while ago that they don't recommend the only method of vault running on EC2, fully support kubernetes, and I saw several of my ideas/feedback listed almost verbatim in the documentation I saw (note, I am not accusing them of plagiarism - these were very obvious complaints that I'm sure I wasn't the only one raising after a while).
It always surprised me how these conversations went. "Well we don't really recommend kubernetes so we won't support (feature)."
Me: "Well the majority of your customers will want to use it this way, so....."
Just was a very frustrating process, and a frustrating product - I love what it does, but there are an unbelievable amount of footguns laden in the enterprise version, not to mention it has a way of worming itself irrevocably into your infrastructure, and due to extremely weird/obfuscated pricing models I'm fairly certain people are waking up to surprise bills nowadays. They also rug pulled some OSS features, particularly MFA login, which kind of pissed me off. The product (in my view) is pretty much worthless to a company without that.
downrightmike|1 year ago
brian_herman|1 year ago
ohad1282|1 year ago
orf|1 year ago
Regardless of various things that have happened, or things that could have been, the company has pushed the envelope with some absolute bangers and we are all better for it, directly or indirectly.
Regardless of what the general opinion is of Hashicorp’s future post-IBM, they made an impact and that should be celebrated, not decried or sorrowed over for lack of a perceived picture perfect ending.
Such is life.
1. https://tomforb.es/blog/dell-system-detect-rce-vulnerability...
2. https://www.hashicorp.com/about/origin-story
neurostimulant|1 year ago
wmf|1 year ago
Confirming what everybody knows, IBM views HashiCorp's products as Terraform, Vault, and some other shit.
amateurhuman|1 year ago
bogantech|1 year ago
foxandmouse|1 year ago
paxys|1 year ago
vdfs|1 year ago
nkotov|1 year ago
mywittyname|1 year ago
Edit: found something: https://www.hashicorp.com/blog/hashicorp-adopts-business-sou...
hbogert|1 year ago
I'm really wondering who is kidding who here. Is it IBM or Hashi?
empressplay|1 year ago
JojoFatsani|1 year ago
ilrwbwrkhv|1 year ago
geodel|1 year ago
So all in all I think another big win for open source even if little indirectly.
lma21|1 year ago
Is that an insane premium or what?
NewJazz|1 year ago
The amount may have been negotiated prior to this month's downturn, which Hashicorp was hit pretty hard by (they had about a 10% fall based on what I'm seeing).
rwmj|1 year ago
unknown|1 year ago
[deleted]
jedberg|1 year ago
mkovach|1 year ago
phlakaton|1 year ago
unknown|1 year ago
[deleted]
liveoneggs|1 year ago
aodin|1 year ago
cdchn|1 year ago
matthewtse|1 year ago
100% of the companies I worked for over the last 6 years all used Terraform, there really wasn't anything else out there, and though there were complaints, it generally worked.
It really provided a lot of value to us, and we definitely would have been willing to pay.
Though every time we asked, we wanted commitment to update the AWS/GCP providers in a timely fashion for new features, and they would never commit and tried to shove some hosted terraform service down our throats, which we would never agree to anyway due to IP/security concerns.
matthewtse|1 year ago
That way, the profit beneficiaries bear the brunt of the development/maintenance costs.
teeray|1 year ago
candiddevmike|1 year ago
throwup238|1 year ago
achristmascarl|1 year ago
worik|1 year ago
Now we know why!
mathverse|1 year ago
There will be nothing worth of using pretty soon as we will all move to the next big foss thing.
op00to|1 year ago
chrisbolt|1 year ago
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40149136
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40149095
Rumor: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40135303
geekodour|1 year ago
wmf|1 year ago
chucky_z|1 year ago
I know if nobody else does anything I will do something myself, personally.
I love Kubernetes, however I feel like things like Nomad and Mesos have a space to exist in as well. Nomad especially holds a special place in my tech-heart. :)
achristmascarl|1 year ago
brian_herman|1 year ago
dralley|1 year ago
dzonga|1 year ago
technically, couldn't have IBM have hired Mitch when he was still doing vagrant ?
and put him in a closet somewhere. Given how Mitch, cranks out products -- could technically been cheaper than 6.4bn but then again IBM ain't hurting for cash.
dbalatero|1 year ago
That sort of vision/foresight seems fairly rare, I'd think particularly rare at an IBM type place.
primax|1 year ago
heipei|1 year ago
devhead|1 year ago
I always have mixed feelings when a software company like this grabs their bag and leaves the community that helped build them, high and dry; good for them but still bad for everyone else nine out of ten times.
0xbadcafebee|1 year ago
bloopernova|1 year ago
Be "interesting" to see what happens to the recently-renamed Terraform Cloud (now Hashicorp Cloud Platform Terraform :eyeroll:)
Edited to add: I'm guessing the feature I want added to the terraform language server is never going to happen now. Terraform's language server doesn't support registries inside Terraform Cloud, it doesn't know how to read the token in your terraformrc. bleh.
vundercind|1 year ago
God, please no. The worst thing about all these tools is the terrible formats they keep choosing.
Given the directions we’ve (“cutting edge” programmers and server ops folks) chosen to go instead, leaving XML behind was a big mistake.
I’d prefer something better, but yaml and json are so terrible that going back to xml would be an improvement.
0xbadcafebee|1 year ago
JojoFatsani|1 year ago
jakozaur|1 year ago
wmf|1 year ago
ChrisArchitect|1 year ago
dang|1 year ago
IBM nearing a buyout deal for HashiCorp, source says - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40135303 - April 2024 (170 comments)
justinsaccount|1 year ago
bayindirh|1 year ago
Also, it's probably the time to archive my Vagrant Machines repository. I guess all HashiCorp tools will be rolling downhill for personal use.
alando46|1 year ago
DLA|1 year ago
declan_roberts|1 year ago
Not a bad place to end up after automating class sign-up at UW!
helloericsf|1 year ago
jll29|1 year ago
In the past, IBM was a technology leader, and probably still has substantial talent excellent inhouse, but from what I'm hearing it has become less appreciative of its researchers and engineers: for instance, my IBM friends lost any patenting activity related bonuses already several years ago.
Also, the Watson debacle (trying to monetize the Watson brand and the (impressive) Watson Jeopardy challenge results by quickly acquiring a bunch of stuff, only to then sell it as "our Watson AI technology") didn't help bolster its reputation, but rather harmed it further.
Companies like IBM and HP should go back to the roots, value science and engineering, take on bold blue-sky projects (don't leave those only to Musk!), and lead by example. Perhaps this could happen, but only with an engineer-scientist at the top instead of professional managers or bean counters (I'm not attacking the perormance of any individual here as I have not been following recent leadership activities of either company recently).
It is unlikely, IMHO, that an acquired company can change the culture of the acquirer. The only time I've seen this happening was Nokia benefitting Microsoft's culture, but that's because they made Nokia's CEO Microsoft's CEO, which is not going to happen with any likelihood in IBM's case.
dade_|1 year ago
ergonaught|1 year ago
Next up, Canonical, though they’ve been tilting sideways without an acquisition to push them.
pjmlp|1 year ago
bzmrgonz|1 year ago
CSMastermind|1 year ago
rzr999|1 year ago
KingOfCoders|1 year ago
renegade-otter|1 year ago
Accelerate! Multi-cloud! Automation!
_akhe|1 year ago
For a lot of developers including me, I never think about IBM or HashiCorp (or Oracle, SAP, etc.) and it's hard to imagine why someone would want to use their software compared to something newer, friendlier, cheaper, and probably faster. Is it just relationships?
Just curious how customers are actually getting value from an IBM or a HashiCorp or an Oracle.
kevindamm|1 year ago
Vault for securely storing keys is also a convenient system component.
Both can be spun up in production without having to go through Hashicorp directly, but they also offer a service for managing the current state of the deployment (some aspects of the system are not queried at runtime and must be kept in a lock file of sorts, and coordinated with others doing any production changes). Some teams will coordinate using an S3 folder or some other ACL'd shared storage instead of relying on Hashicorp Cloud.
I find it's the closest thing to a public version of the service management tools I grew used to within Google, and it has been a driving force for the DevOps movement. I think something else could come along and do it better but it does seem like a lot of upkeep to retain parity with all the cloud services' products. I hope OpenTofu is successful, competition helps.
arcticgeek|1 year ago
unknown|1 year ago
[deleted]
roschdal|1 year ago
beastman82|1 year ago
praveenweb|1 year ago
atlantasun33|1 year ago
hi-v-rocknroll|1 year ago
https://web.archive.org/web/20110220214126/http://www-03.ibm...
kickofline|1 year ago
op00to|1 year ago
Khaine|1 year ago
tiffanyh|1 year ago
MangoCoffee|1 year ago
thinkmassive|1 year ago
https://openbao.org/
Backed by the Linux Foundation
hacknews20|1 year ago
ceocoder|1 year ago
osigurdson|1 year ago
spxneo|1 year ago
op00to|1 year ago
EMCymatics|1 year ago
op00to|1 year ago
dralley|1 year ago
IBM doesn't assert their will upon Red Hat anywhere near as strongly as HN seems to think they do and in particular the whole story about IBM killing CentOS is BS.
the_real_cher|1 year ago
devjab|1 year ago
I know the decision makers in our shop spent quite a lot of time deciding between the two. Finally decided on bicep after a number of what has probably been the most boring workshops I’ve ever attended. I’m fairly certain they are very happy with that decision now though. Not so much because big blue is evil, but because now we’re only beholden to one evil (Microsoft) and not two.
I don’t actually think Microsoft or IBM are evil. They are just not ideal from an European enterprise perspective because they are subject to an increasing amount of anti-non-eu legalisation and national/internal security issues.
unknown|1 year ago
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DrStartup|1 year ago
notnmeyer|1 year ago
rdl|1 year ago
dangtony98|1 year ago
Disclaimer: I’m one of the founders.
gagoako1995|1 year ago
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unknown|1 year ago
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unknown|1 year ago
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coachEnvy|1 year ago
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unknown|1 year ago
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unknown|1 year ago
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krooj|1 year ago
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yevpats|1 year ago
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ilrwbwrkhv|1 year ago
dralley|1 year ago
soraminazuki|1 year ago
rank0|1 year ago
racl101|1 year ago
cqqxo4zV46cp|1 year ago
solardev|1 year ago
belter|1 year ago
Think every core IT infra of most of the developed world countries, most of the ebanking and core messaging infra of your large banks and insurance companies, plus billions per year in consulting services revenue.
https://www.ibm.com/products
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_IBM_products
lolinder|1 year ago
https://www.redhat.com/en/about/press-releases/ibm-closes-la...
timr|1 year ago
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/ibm-releases-first-quarter-re...
onlyrealcuzzo|1 year ago
Additionally, you don't need the full purchase price in cash to buy the company. You can do leveraged buyouts, etc.
frognumber|1 year ago
If you're a shipyard, an oil company, a bank, an automaker, etc. you still need software to manage things like inventory, employees, logistics, and similar, and you have zero expertise to do it in-house. They also have zero expertise to find a qualified vendor.
IBM is a safe bet.
That's a huge market.
op00to|1 year ago
playingalong|1 year ago
arp242|1 year ago
I think they can find a few billions lying around, without having to turn the sofa cushions.
listenallyall|1 year ago
hnthrow289570|1 year ago
If HashiCorp stuff is destined to die, something else will eventually rise to fill its niche if it's still valuable.
You can always count on technology to churn for no good reason.
To avoid sounding completely pessimestic: don't discount an IBM comeback either, for the same churning reasons.