Josh Minthorne
Director – Hybrid Cloud Practice
IBM’s recent acquisition of HashiCorp for $6.4 billion marks a significant milestone in the evolution of hybrid and multi-cloud infrastructure management. This strategic move, coupled with the 2019 acquisition of Red Hat – which offers the Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform – enhances IBM’s offerings focused on automating infrastructure management and facilitating the adoption of hybrid-cloud and multi-cloud models for today’s modern businesses.
Enhancing Infrastructure Automation
HashiCorp’s suite of products, notably Terraform and Vault, are renowned for enabling organizations to automate infrastructure provisioning, security, networking, and workload orchestration across diverse cloud environments. Companies leveraging Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC) tools like Terraform, Ansible, or similar solutions experience benefits such as:
• A 40% reduction in deployment time
• A 30% increase in operational efficiency
• Reduction in human errors
• Up to 50% (or higher) reduction in security vulnerabilities
• A 40% reduction in infrastructure-related downtime1
By integrating these tools into its portfolio, IBM offers customers complementary infrastructure and lifecycle management solutions. This allows enterprises the flexibility to select enterprise-grade, supported solutions to streamline operations and address the complexities associated with heterogeneous infrastructure strategies, ultimately driving cost savings and improved resource utilization.
Accelerating Hybrid-Cloud and Multi-Cloud Adoption
The acquisition underscores IBM’s commitment to hybrid cloud strategies, reflecting customers’ desire for flexible cloud solutions. With approximately 75% of enterprises currently leveraging hybrid cloud environments, integrating HashiCorp’s automation tools is expected to facilitate more efficient management and deployment across public clouds and on-premises data centers. This alignment is crucial for organizations aiming to innovate through consistent infrastructure delivery and management at scale – while reducing operational overhead.
Synergies with IBM’s Existing Offerings
The merger is anticipated to create significant synergies across IBM’s strategic growth areas, including Red Hat, watsonx, data security, and IT automation. For instance, combining HashiCorp’s Terraform with Red Hat’s Ansible Automation Platform allows for seamless automation from infrastructure provisioning to application deployment. Additionally, integrating HashiCorp Vault with IBM’s security frameworks (or other platforms) enhances secrets management and compliance automation, which is vital for industries requiring stringent data governance and security measures.
Supporting AI-Driven Workloads
The rise of generative AI(GenAI) is expected to drive the creation of one billion new cloud-native applications by 20282. Automating the management and security of this expanding infrastructure is crucial, and infrastructure automation tools provide the necessary capabilities to support the deployment and scaling of AI workloads. This complements IBM’s AI initiatives, particularly its watsonx platform, and strengthens its overall AI strategy.
How Mainline Can Help
Enterprises are seeking expert guidance to harness the power of IaC solutions. Mainline is helping organizations successfully navigate cloud transformation, automation, security, and infrastructure management, ensuring they can fully leverage solutions like Terraform, Ansible, and other technologies to achieve their business objectives. With deep expertise in multi-cloud environments, Mainline helps enterprises streamline operations, enhance security, and drive innovation, enabling long-term agility and efficiency in their IT strategies.
Mainline’s Hybrid Cloud practice helps customers innovate by assessing the organization’s current infrastructure, management, and cloud maturity, then designing an optimized hybrid cloud strategy and implementing automation frameworks. We aim to enable seamless infrastructure management for our customers by providing training, governance frameworks, and following best practices to ensure ongoing success.
Contact Mainline to start a conversation about advancing your hybrid cloud and multi-cloud strategies or initiatives.
More Information
As an IBM Platinum Business Partner and a Red Hat Premier Business Partner, Mainline has extensive experience helping customers with IBM Enterprise Servers, software solutions, and across the three pillars of Red Hat’s business: hybrid cloud infrastructure; cloud-native application development; and IT automation and management. To set up an in-depth discussion about how to get started using these innovative technologies, please contact your Mainline Account Executive directly or contact us here.
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Footnotes:
1 Gartner 2014 Average Cost of Downtime report estimates the average cost of IT downtime is $5,600/minute or $300,000/hour.
2 IDC 1 billion New Logical Applications: More Background