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IBM to buy HashiCorp in $6.4B deal

reuters.com

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Re: IBM to buy HashiCorp in $6.4B deal

#331

Post by kensey »

coredog64 wrote: post #286
TheCondor wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IBM has always been a punching bag. I had been wondering who would buy HCP, I sort of figured it was either going to be AWS, Google, or Azure and then I figured the other vendor were going to have support removed (maybe gradually, maybe not.)

It could have been worse: It could have been Oracle.

One of the reasons I left when I did was that it was starting to get really obvious that an acquisition was likely and I desperately did not want my work e-mail address to end in oracle.com.

Re: IBM to buy HashiCorp in $6.4B deal

#332

Post by kensey »

raffraffraff wrote: post #314
jnsaff2 wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> HashiCorp always felt like a company made by actual engineers. IDK about this, in 2018 I was in a position to pay for their services. They asked for stupid amount of money and got none because they asked so much. Can't remember what the exact numbers were but but it felt like ElasticSearch or Oracle.

Same. And I didn't feel like we were getting anything for that crazy money aside from than "support" (which management wanted, pre IPO, to make a bunch of security audits seem easier ). We preferred to stick with our own tooling and services that we built around Vault (for example) than use the official enterprise stuff. Same goes for terraform today: I don't feel like we need Terraform Cloud, when we've got other op…

Vault's client-based pricing was (is) the worst thing about selling it. When I was there, nobody in sales liked it except the SEs and account reps dealing with the largest customers (and those customers loved it because it actually saved them a substantial amount of money over other vendors' models like per-use or per-secret). All the customers except those very largest ones hated it. The repeated response from those who believed in the client-based pricing model, to those of us pointing out the issues with it, was essentially "if your customers don't like it, they must not understand it because you aren't doing a good enough job explaining it".

What I thought we really needed was a "starter/enterprise" dual-model pricing structure, so that smaller customers could get pricing in some unit they could understand and budget for, that would naturally and predictably grow as they grew, to a point where it would actually be beneficial to them to switch to client-based pricing -- but there seemed to be a general reluctance to have anything but a single pricing model for any of our products.

Re: IBM to buy HashiCorp in $6.4B deal

#333

Post by elevader »

rank0 wrote: post #94
calgoo wrote: 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 don’t understand people’s beef with IBM. They have been responsible for incredible R&D within computing. I even LIKE redhat/fedora! HashiCorp had already been sold out since waaaay before this acquisition and I also don’t understand why their engineers are seen as “special”…

I have the "honor" of getting to use IBM $PRODUCT at $COMPANY.

- it uses some form of consensus algorithm between all nodes that somehow manages to randomly get the whole cluster into a non working state by simply existing, requiring manual reboots

- Patches randomly introduce new features, often times with breaking changes to current behaviour

- Patches tend to break random different things and even the patches for those patches often don't work

- For some reason the process how to apply updates randomly changes between every couple of patches, making automation all but impossible

- the support doesn't know how $PRODUCT works, which leads to us explaining to them how it actually does things

- It is ridiculously expensive, both in hardware and licensing costs

All of this has been going on for years without any signs of improvement for now, to the point that $COMPANY now avoids IBM if at all possible

Re: IBM to buy HashiCorp in $6.4B deal

#334

Post by sgerenser »

glenngillen wrote: post #321
lbotos wrote: post #284

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know how pre-public to IPO RSUs work but let's do some math assuming IPO day is "day when RSUs vest": IPO day and you get 1000 RSUs unlocked/vested. Share price is $80. You made 80k gains. For simplicity let's say you owed 40K in taxes. One of two things happens: - Hasihcorp auto sells to cover and you get 500 less shares. - You need to pay your taxes on your own and earmark 40K. Let's pick the easy one: If H…

I don't need to make any assumptions about anything here, other former colleagues have gone through the specifics in other replies. Nothing is auto-sold at IPO to cover taxes, a maximum of 10% of what had vested was allowed to be sold before the 6mo lockup expired. There was a total of a few weeks before a combination of trading blackout window, lockup, and market crash conspired to have make it easy to be underwater…

I’m pretty sure U.S. law requires companies to withhold at 22% (or optionally higher) for any bonus/non-salary payments, which includes RSU vesting. Companies can choose to either “sell to cover” or just issue a proportionally lower amount of shares (e.g. you vested 1000 shares but only 780 show up in your brokerage account).

The problem occurs when 22% isn’t enough, which is often the case.

Re: IBM to buy HashiCorp in $6.4B deal

#335

Post by kensey »

JohnMakin wrote: post #73
ClassAndBurn wrote: post #40

Hashi never sold me on the integration of their products, which was my primary issue with not selecting them. Each is independently useful, and there is no nudge to combine them for a 1+1=3 feature set. Kubernetes was the chasm. Owning the computing platform is the core of utilizing Vault and integrating it. The primary issue was that there was never a "One Click" way to create an environment using Vagarent, Packer,…

I was an extremely early user and owner of a very large-scale Vault deployment on Kubernetes. Worked with a few of their sales engineers closely on it - was always told early on that although they supported vault on kubernetes via a helm chart, they did not recommend using it on anything but EC2 instances (because of "security" which never really made sense their reasoning). During every meeting and conference I'd as…

> was always told early on that although they supported vault on kubernetes via a helm chart, they did not recommend using it on anything but EC2 instances (because of "security" which never really made sense their reasoning).

The reasoning is basically that there are some security and isolation guarantees you don't get in Kubernetes that you do get on bare metal or (to a somewhat lesser extent) in VMs.

In particular for Kubernetes, Vault wants to run as a non-root user and set the IPC_LOCK capability when it starts to prevent its memory from being swapped to disk. While in Docker you can directly enable this by adding capabilities when you launch the container, Kubernetes has an issue because of the way it handles non-root container users specified in a pod manifest, detailed in a (long-dormant) KEP: https://github.com/kubernetes/enhancements/blob/master/keps/... (tl;dr: Kubernetes runs the container process as root, with the specified capabilities added, but then switches it to the non-root UID, which causes the explicitly-added capabilities to be dropped).

You can work around this by rebuilding the container and setting the capability directly on the binary, but the upstream build of the binary and the one in the container image don't come with that set (because the user should set it at runtime if running the container image directly, and the systemd unit sets it via systemd if running as a systemd service, so there's no need to do that except for working around Kubernetes' ambient-capability issue).

> It always surprised me how these conversations went. "Well we don't really recommend kubernetes so we won't support (feature)."

> Me: "Well the majority of your customers will want to use it this way, so....."

Ha, I had a similar conversation internally in the early days of Boundary. Something like "Hey, if I run Boundary in Kubernetes, X won't work because Y." And the initial response was "Why would you want to run Boundary in Kubernetes?" The Boundary team came around pretty quick though, and Kubernetes ended up being one of the flagship use cases for it.

Re: IBM to buy HashiCorp in $6.4B deal

#336

Post by tecleandor »

jnsaff2 wrote: post #98
calgoo wrote: 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.

> HashiCorp always felt like a company made by actual engineers. IDK about this, in 2018 I was in a position to pay for their services. They asked for stupid amount of money and got none because they asked so much. Can't remember what the exact numbers were but but it felt like ElasticSearch or Oracle.

But it's even more expensive now! There's no limit!

Re: IBM to buy HashiCorp in $6.4B deal

#337

Post by kensey »

glenngillen wrote: post #198
kevindamm wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, they went from a more permissive license (Mozilla MPL) to a less permissive one (BUSL) but I can kind of understand why. I can also understand why the OSS community is upset, and after Hashicorp went after OpenTOFU recently, I'm siding more with the OSS community here. Before the license change, another project (Pulumi) built something that was basically a thin wrapper on Terraform and some convenient functiona…

It’s been widely speculated, months ago when the change happened, that Terraform has become the scapegoat for this licensing change. The actual impetus was IBM reselling Vault. IBM then helped push the OSS fork of Vault (OpenBao) and this acquisition just brings this whole license change thing to a convenient conclusion for IBM.

Almost all the talk I saw internally, from well before to well after the license change, about competitors "taking advantage" of our open-source versions was about TFC competitors like Spacelift, Scalr, etc. and Terraform OSS. The Vault competitor mentioned most often was Akeyless but for reasons less like the TFC competition. I saw IBM Cloud Secrets Manager mentioned maybe once or twice.

I'm sure IBM Cloud's Vault offering was part of the decision, but from where I was sitting, it didn't look like the reason or even the primary reason.

Re: IBM to buy HashiCorp in $6.4B deal

#338

Post by tecleandor »

doubled112 wrote: post #214
phlakaton wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They'll do what they should have done years ago: give up on all this fuddy duddy syntax and just go with XML. ;-)

Was this supposed to make my eye twitch? Don’t give them any ideas.

Don't worry, IBM has you covered!

https://www.ibm.com/docs/en/datapower-gateway/10.5.x?topic=2...

Re: IBM to buy HashiCorp in $6.4B deal

#339

Post by kensey »

mdasen wrote: post #122
NewJazz wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. Ma…

Analyst consensus I've seen on long-term price has been floating around $32-34 per share. Take that with as much salt as you think it needs but it's at least interesting that it's within shouting distance of (but not over) the IBM offer.

Re: IBM to buy HashiCorp in $6.4B deal

#340

Post by darkwater »

redserk wrote: post #110
Rinzler89 wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People's beef here with IBM is they don't make shiny phones and laptops and don't create hip jobs where you're paid 500k+ to "change the world" by selling ads or making the 69th messaging app. They just focus on tried and tested boring SW that big businesses find useful and that's not popular on HN which is more startup and disruption focused.

This is unnecessarily dismissive. While Hashicorp hasn’t been exciting for a while, I fail to see how an acquisition from IBM will invigorate excitement, much less even a neutral reaction from many developers. Hashicorp had a huge hand in defining and popularizing the modern DevOps procedures we now declare as best practices. That’s a torch to hold that would be very difficult for a business like IBM. Perhaps I misse…

> This is unnecessarily dismissive.

No, it is not. HN has both a "greybeard" audience that will cheer in "Go boring tech" posts and an "hipster" audience that is heavily start-up and disruption focused as GP was saying. When talking about IBM and acquisitions or similar topics, it's usually the second audience that speaks more.

That doesn't mean that some acquisition really kill the product, but you don't need to be as big and old as IBM to do that.

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