In April 2024, IBM sent shockwaves through the COSS world by announcing that it had agreed to acquire HashiCorp for $6.4 billion. HashiCorp is a COSS success story (license changes notwithstanding), having gone public in 2021. Its popular infrastructure-as-code tool Terraform has emerged as a de facto standard for automating the provisioning and management of resources across an organization’s network infrastructure.

After a lengthy regulatory review process, the acquisition was completed on February 27, 2025, clearing the path for IBM to integrate HashiCorp’s suite of technologies into its portfolio. IBM is also the home of Red Hat, which is the most prominent COSS success story and perhaps the godfather of all COSS companies. That makes for some interesting potential synergies, as explained by RedMonk analyst KellyAnn Fitzpatrick:

Both Red Hat’s Ansible Automation Platform and Hashicorp’s Terraform play in the infrastructure automation space. Notably, both products have their roots in open source, with Red Hat AAP building on upstream OSS projects and Terraform previously available under an open source license prior its relicense in 2023 (see more from Steve O’Grady on this). While both Ansible and Terraform can be (and are) used for a wide range of automation objectives, Terraform uses a specific language and has strengths in areas like infrastructure provisioning and other IaC processes, whereas Ansible leverages YAML and shines in configuration management, software deployment, and orchestration.

Most organizations leverage multiple automation tools, with the Ansible/Terraform combination common enough that it has earned the nickname “Terrible” (or, alternatively, “Terrable” or “Ansiform”), and led to “better together” stories from Red Hat and Hashicorp. With IBM now owning both, many are curious to see how the “better together” story plays out vis-a-vis more intentional integration (or at least usage guidance) between the two.