US antitrust watchdog wants more details on IBM’s acquisition of HashiCorp

US antitrust watchdog wants more details on IBM’s acquisition of HashiCorp

Both HashiCorp and its intended new owner IBM must provide more information about the planned acquisition. Documents filed today by HashiCorp with the US antitrust authority Federal Trade Commission (FTC) show that the latter intends to conduct a more in-depth antitrust investigation.

IBM plans to acquire HashiCorp for 6.4 billion dollars (5.86 billion euros) The FTC is now reviewing whether this acquisition complies with applicable rules to prevent monopolization. This is normal with large acquisitions, but such a thorough investigation could delay the approval of the acquisition by months, or worse, years.

Reinvention through acquisitions

HashiCorp still thinks the deal will be completed by the end of this year, as announced in April. However, IBM, the intended new owner, has not yet responded to a request for comment, Bloomberg reported.

IBM is trying to reinvent itself by making a series of software-focused acquisitions. The largest of these was Red Hat, for which IBM paid 34 billion dollars (31 billion euros), in 2019. By acquiring HashiCorp, IBM aims to expand its hybrid cloud services and software management capabilities.

Terraform as a jewel in the crown

For IBM, the main spoils of the HashiCorp acquisition would be the Terraform tool. Developed by HashiCorp itself, it allows organizations to set up cloud instances and automate allocated hardware resources. Other cloud tools in HashiCorp’s suite focus on security, networking and development environments. Users can access cloud-based variants of these tools through the HashiCorp Cloud Platform (HCP).

HashiCorp’s unified product suite under this banner is now generally available in Europe. The products receive new features and enhancements, which the company presents under the collective term ‘The Infrastructure Cloud’.

Incidentally, when the company converted TerraForm’s open source license to a Business Source license last year, TerraForm was immediately forked, with OpenToFu (initially OpenTF) as a result. Oracle, among others, decided to switch to the open source variant.

Read more: With Infrastructure Cloud, HashiCorp reinvents its entire product portfolio