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IBM to buy HashiCorp in $6.4B deal

reuters.com

121–130 of 391 posts

Re: IBM to buy HashiCorp in $6.4B deal

#121

Overpriced, haha.

Agree, this number seems enormous. Maybe there is a big stream of hosted services revenue that I'm just not participating.

It’s ~10x their revenue which is not crazy in saas. If anything it’s underpriced only because of current economic headwinds

Re: IBM to buy HashiCorp in $6.4B deal

#122
post #24
post #2

> IBM will pay $35 per share for HashiCorp, a 42.6% premium to Monday's closing price Is that an insane premium or what?

I think typical premium is about 20% for acquisitions. The amount may have been negotiated prior to this month's downturn, which Hashicorp was hit pretty hard by (they had about a 10% fall based on what I'm seeing).

Yea, I think it often depends on where a company's stock has moved recently. IBM's offer is still below HashiCorp's 52-week high. That means there's probably a lot of current investors who likely wouldn't approve a deal at a 20% premium. If your stock is near its 52-week high, then a 20% premium looks a lot more reasonable.

April-August of last year, HashiCorp was regularly above a 20% premium over Monday's close. Many investors might think it would get back there without a merger - and it had been higher. IBM is offering $35/share which is close to the $36.39 52-week high. In some cases, investors are delusional and just bought in at the peak. In other cases, a company's shares have been under-valued and the company shouldn't sell itself cheaply.

I don't think one can really have a fixed percent premium for acquisitions because it really depends. Is their stock trading at a bargain price right now? Maybe people who believe in the stock own a lot of the company and don't have more capital to buy shares at the price they consider to be a bargain - but would vote against selling at that bargain price even if they can't buy more. They're confident other investors will come around. An acquiring company wants to make an offer they think will be accepted by the majority of investors, but also doesn't want to pay more than it has to. If the stock has been down and investors think it's a sinking ship, they don't have to offer much of a premium. If the stock is up a ton and investors sense a bubble, maybe they don't have to offer much of a premium. If the stock has been battered, but a lot of shareholders believe in it, then they might need to offer more of a premium.

Re: IBM to buy HashiCorp in $6.4B deal

#123
post #53

Certainly an interesting turn of events. I really enjoy using Terraform (and Terraform cloud) for work but the license changes made me cautious to integrate anymore.

What was the licensing changes? I see a lot of references to it as though it was common knowledge, but I'm not aware of them. Edit: found something: https://www.hashicorp.com/blog/hashicorp-adopts-business-sou...

Nobody else is bow allowed to make a public offering of a terraform-using product. That is, you can not provide terraform as a service. Gitlab, Azure DevOps, etc all have to move to something else as they can not provide terraform builders without a special license.

This was a major blow to the participating open source community. The license bow used is also vague and untested.

Re: IBM to buy HashiCorp in $6.4B deal

#124
funny how these things are sometimes.

technically, couldn't have IBM have hired Mitch when he was still doing vagrant ?

and put him in a closet somewhere. Given how Mitch, cranks out products -- could technically been cheaper than 6.4bn but then again IBM ain't hurting for cash.

Re: IBM to buy HashiCorp in $6.4B deal

#125
post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Although there is significant overlap between the two, I prefer Terraform for resource provisioning and Ansible for resource configuration.

Same, but now IBM will be able to merge them to create Terrible (or Ansiform). ;)

I like the joke. But a better integration between terraform and ansible for config would be pretty neat.

Re: IBM to buy HashiCorp in $6.4B deal

#126
post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hashicorp had a $14 billion IPO in Dec 2021 and was trading at ~$4.7 billion right before the acquisition announcement. At that point it doesn't matter what the company or its founders want or what their long term vision is. Shareholders are in charge and heads are going to roll if the price doesn't get back up quick by any means necessary.

Yet another example of why I think it's a mistake to take your company public. If I put in the work to build up a successful business, no way would I ever let it be turned into a machine that ignores long term health for the sake of making the stock price go up.

While I would think that, realistically most of my principles are for sale for a few billion dollars.

Re: IBM to buy HashiCorp in $6.4B deal

#127
post #49

Well, it was nice while it lasted! HashiCorp always felt like a company made by actual engineers, not "bean counters". Now it will just be another cog in the IBM machine, slowly grinding it down, removing everything attractive, just like RedHat and CentOS. Hopefully this will create a new wave off innovation, and someone will create something to replace the monopoly on IaC that IBM now owns.

Hashi code, such as Terraform, was (is) an amazing example of a good reference Go codebase. It was very hard for me to get into Go because, outside of the language trivia and hype, it was hard to learn about the patterns and best practices needed for building even a mid-sized application.

That's interesting. I found Go to be a very productive and easy language, coming from Typescript.

But I had a similar experience like yours with PHP, I just couldn't get into it.

Re: IBM to buy HashiCorp in $6.4B deal

#128
post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hashicorp had a $14 billion IPO in Dec 2021 and was trading at ~$4.7 billion right before the acquisition announcement. At that point it doesn't matter what the company or its founders want or what their long term vision is. Shareholders are in charge and heads are going to roll if the price doesn't get back up quick by any means necessary.

Yet another example of why I think it's a mistake to take your company public. If I put in the work to build up a successful business, no way would I ever let it be turned into a machine that ignores long term health for the sake of making the stock price go up.

You have no idea what decisions you'll make if you ever were to get that successful.

I'm sure you've broken many promises to your younger self.

Re: IBM to buy HashiCorp in $6.4B deal

#129
post #118
post #49

Well, it was nice while it lasted! HashiCorp always felt like a company made by actual engineers, not "bean counters". Now it will just be another cog in the IBM machine, slowly grinding it down, removing everything attractive, just like RedHat and CentOS. Hopefully this will create a new wave off innovation, and someone will create something to replace the monopoly on IaC that IBM now owns.

I see this as an opportunity. Not to replace HashiCorp's products - OpenTofu and OpenBao are snapping up most of the mindshare for now - but to build another OSS-first developer darling company.

Onboardbase is a great alternative to HashiCorp Vault.

https://onboardbase.com/

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