IBM to acquire Hashi for $6.4B, hopes it will boost software biz and Red Hat IBM has announced it will acquire Hashi for $6.4 billion, and touted the deal as meaning its hybrid cloud platform will emerge with a “comprehensive” set of products. Big Blue CEO Arvind Krishna said enterprises are struggling to wrestle complex tech estates sprawling across multiple clouds, on-prem environments, and …
Great opportunity for shaving and hair dye products salesmen to go round Hashi offices.
These processes are made complex on purpose so that the suppliers get extensions for maintaining them.
Kind of crude way of introducing vendor lock-in.
Even if engineers wanted to so something simple that works just as well, they'll get slapped "This is some first year at uni level of solution. We can't show that to the client, it will make us look bad. Make something complex." and translation "If the client sees it can be that simple, they may hire someone in-house to do it and we lose them."
Just curious and maybe a techie can provide a simple answer :
This is Big Blue.
They used to write software.
Now they buy it.
For US$6+bn
Can't Big Blue develop its own Hashi clone for a lot less than 6bn?**
**I know I know - IP issues - but I presume it could be written in a non-ripoff way.
It's not a techie thing. It's a C-suite keeping the investors happy thing. M&A grows faster (in the short term) than growing organically. At least in the metrics that shareholders have wet dreams over.
It's generally a disaster though. Possibly the worst example is Cisco's acquisition of Sourcefire to get themselves a "Next Generation Firewall". I think the promised products integrating the tech finally arrived 3 years late. And, good grief, what a mucking fess their softwate internals are.
《focused users’ attention on choices for the platform they’ll use to host and build applications for the next 20 or 30 years》
Given that the changes that occurred between a dot com crash and the advent of AI/LLM span three decades, anyone actually worrying about what their applications are going to run on, two or three decades out, is probably not big on "focus." Too much hippy weed in C-suite circles?
According to Musk your cloud work loads are going to run on his Tesla fleet platform.
My crystal ball tells me that virtualization (a la VMWare etc) is likely to be replaced by something akin to software directed assembly of hardware (cpu, gpu) components producing an ad hoc processor/system to run the application's code eg if your app doesn't use floating point ops then no fpu is added to the mix, no vector ops likewise. Happy to be around in 30 years to be proved wrong, :)
I had the announcement pop up in my LinkedIn feed.
The comment thread is a thing to behold. The sycophancy made me nauseous several times. Mostly from IBMers and channel partners. Actual comments about how support and development would now improve to another level with IBM backing.
Wut?! Maybe it was IBM "AI" bots, I dunno.
My favourite one was the guy excitedly predicting a merger between IBM + Broadcom + AWS in a few years. I'm serious! To create the tech stack of the future, or some such. That's the mental level of the cheerleaders on that thread.
Once big blue balls gets hold of this, it will signal the migration away from terrorform and packer. And then what? I hear opentofu is rather good now. Only the biggest players with massive investments and are use to being abused by IBM will stick around. <Sarcasm>This can only end well </Sarcasm>
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