HashiCorp speaks up about adjusting to life under IBM

Freshly acquired cloud darling talks mainframes, Ansible, and influencing Big Blue at HashiDays event

HashiCorp is now an IBM company, with one staffer remarking: "We're actually quite happy for it, most of us sitting in this room at least."

The comment came during a briefing at this week's London HashiDays event – the first since the IBM merger went through.

While HashiCorp was eager to talk about General Availability of products including HCP Vault Radar and Boundary transparent sessions, and post-quantum cryptography updates to Vault Enterprise, the company also addressed the Big Blue elephant in the room.

Commenting on the cultural differences between IBM and its new acquirement, HashiCorp CTO and co-founder Armon Dadgar described it as "interesting." Yes, there are the usual irritations that come with many mergers – HashiCorp is a Google Suite and Zoom shop, while, according to Dadgar, "IBM's all-in on Office 365" – but putting a company that likes to measure its release cadence in months together with something that works in years is a challenge. Just ask Red Hat.

"It's almost hard to describe IBM as one culture," said Dadgar during a later briefing. "Because things like Red Hat are so different. So I'd say Red Hat is much closer to us in terms of [having] open source in their DNA. They are very community-oriented.

"What's different is we have a much more product management culture, which is closer to IBM in terms of how they think, versus Red Hat, [which] is much more engineering community driven.

"So there's different cultural alignments at different places. I think Red Hat gets open source more than IBM does ... But pockets of IBM really get it, like IBM Research does a ton of stuff in open source."

Considering it's license change, how much HashiCorp "gets" open source these days is debatable. It moved to a Business Source License in 2023, meaning that the source code was still available but with restrictions on its usage.

The decision led to the OpenTofu project, a fork of HashiCorp's flagship Terraform project, and with the sudden license change ruining Cloud Native Computing Foundation CTO Chris Aniszczyk's vacation.

The Register asked HashiCorp during the briefing if there were any plans to change the license again. After all, Redis recently shifted to the AGPL license following a dalliance with more restrictive terms that led to the Valkey project.

The response was an awkward silence, followed by the comment: "We are where we are."

There were also some blunt comments regarding IBM's attempts to be a player in the cloud marketplace. IBM Cloud was notably absent from presentations about HashiCorp's work with the likes of AWS and Azure. "I think they're very honest about where they are in the market right now," said one of the Hashi reps.

Nevertheless, Big Blue's influence is already being felt in HashiCorp's technical direction. For example, there is support for the company's mainframes, as well as multiple areas within the Red Hat ecosystem where HashiCorp's products could be tightly integrated. Dadgar gave the example of Red Hat Ansible.

"The way I look at it is Terraform has always been a great provisioning tool, but a terrible configuration management tool. And Ansible is kind of the opposite. It's like, it's a great management tool, but a terrible provisioning tool. So I think if you bring them together, you kind of get the best of both worlds."

We could imagine individuals within IBM squeaking with delight at that, right up until Dadgar admitted that such an integration, while technically possible, would not have been a priority before the acquisition. "Why would we spend this much engineering resources to make [Terraform] work better with someone else's product?"

And then there is how to sell. Dadgar described IBM's approach as a little "passive," with an array of products presented to customers, inviting them to select whatever makes sense for them. "That's very different from the way HashiCorp has always approached this, which is, for us, always about a story of 'Hey, we're trying to enable a hybrid cloud operating model. What do you – the customer – need to make that possible?' We kind of give you a point of view. So we've been trying to influence and sort of change that for IBM."

It's still early days, and while HashiCorp might now have an "IBM Company" tag, there is still work to be done and, lessons from the Red Hat acquisition that could be applied. The integrations are not surprising, but one worry expressed by an attendee at the HashiDays event was over where HashiCorp's focus would be in the coming years.

The customer told The Register that the products were already expensive and purchases were becoming difficult to justify. If HashiCorp is directed to chase IBM's customer base, there is a real risk that it might lose touch with its community, some of whom are still a little sore after the company's license change. ®