HashiCorp officially joins the IBM family

Today we announced that HashiCorp has officially joined the IBM family as the acquisition announced last year was finalized. I wanted to use this moment to reflect on the journey to this point and to look forward to what this means for the next chapter of HashiCorp.

When Mitchell Hashimoto and I started HashiCorp over a decade ago, we believed cloud computing would cause a seismic shift in how applications are built and delivered. As developers, we saw the obvious value of having an elastic infrastructure that could be provisioned programmatically: less focus on the nitty gritty of infrastructure and more focus on delivering value. As infrastructure operators, we knew the traditional approaches to management would not scale, and we needed entirely new approaches.

Over the last decade, HashiCorp has been one of the pioneers in defining the paradigms of modern cloud infrastructure. HashiCorp Terraform helped define and popularize infrastructure as code for provisioning and managing infrastructure, leveraging the elastic and API-driven nature of cloud computing while focusing on the user experience. HashiCorp Vault helped define secrets management and bring identity-based approaches to security, which is key to a zero trust architecture, replacing traditional approaches to perimeter security and hardcoded credentials. Going all the way back, Vagrant was the first HashiCorp product, and it helped usher in automated development environments with the famous “vagrant up” that informed the UX of many popular DevOps tools.

We are passionate about building products to solve problems, and that has led to the wide portfolio of tools we have today. We don’t want to solve abstract problems for our intellectual satisfaction, but instead focus on the real-world challenges faced by our users and customers. Our motto has always been “infrastructure enables innovation” and it’s been incredible to see what our customers have been able to build — from engaging hundreds of millions of online gamers, to securing trillions of financial transactions, to modernizing government and healthcare services. Today, our products are downloaded more than half a billion times a year, used by hundreds of thousands of organizations, and critical for nearly 5,000 commercial customers.

From the very beginning, we’ve focused on building a community of practitioners who use and build upon our software. This close connection with the community has always been key to developing products users love. Today, that community includes hundreds of thousands of users from around the world. Our community also includes our technology and system integrator partners who’ve worked with us to ensure their solutions work well with ours, enabling thousands of product integrations. Finally, it is the trust placed in us by our customers that has allowed us to continue to scale and invest in our mission.

To the many users, customers, partners, and employees who have been our champions and supporters, I want to extend a huge thank you. Without your support, we would not have been able to reach this milestone.

When we started HashiCorp, we had a strong conviction about the trajectory of cloud computing that has proven correct. Hybrid and multi-cloud is the clear reality for large enterprises, and with the rise of GenAI, we expect an entirely new generation of applications to emerge. More than ever, those who build and operate technology need a consistent approach to delivering and managing infrastructure at scale and modernizing security to keep infrastructure, applications, and data secure.

This brings us to the future of HashiCorp at IBM. Mitchell and I used to joke that if Microsoft’s goal was a PC on every desk, then we wanted HashiCorp running in every datacenter. While we’ve made large strides towards that vision with HashiCorp as an independent company, I’m incredibly optimistic about realizing that vision with IBM. By joining forces, we gain access to their global scale and increased R&D resources. This allows us to reach more customers and continue to invest in solving infrastructure and security challenges.

The IBM and Red Hat portfolio also has many products we can integrate with to deliver a better user experience. Integrating Terraform for provisioning with Ansible for configuration management will enable an end-to-end approach to infrastructure automation as code, while integrating Terraform with Cloudability will bring native FinOps capabilities to manage and optimize cost at scale. Vault integration with OpenShift, Ansible, and Guardium will bring world-class secrets management to those platforms and reduce the integration burden on end users.

More broadly, I’m excited by the alignment of vision between HashiCorp and IBM leadership. We both acknowledge that the hybrid and multi-cloud world is here to stay, and we want to build out the portfolio of products to make that world consistent, secure, and cost-effective. HashiCorp will continue to operate as a division of IBM Software with the same mission, but on a bigger stage.

For our broader community of users, customers, and partners, we look forward to continuing to work together to solve the biggest challenges of today and beyond.