At IBM Think 2025, RedMonk’s Steve O’Grady sits down with HashiCorp CTO Armon Dadgar and IBM’s Tarun Chopra to talk about what the IBM + HashiCorp deal means for devs. They dig into how HashiCorp tools like Terraform, Vault, and Nomad will stay core to the workflow, how IBM plans to invest across the full stack, and how everything will integrate with Red Hat and OpenShift. If you use HashiCorp in your day-to-day or care about hybrid cloud, automation, and scaling infrastructure as code, this one is for you.

This was a RedMonk video, sponsored by IBM.

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Transcript

Steve O’Grady: Good morning, good afternoon, good evening. I am Steve O’Grady, the principal analyst from RedMonk. I am here live from the Heinz Convention Center in Boston at IBM Think 2025. And I’m here with two distinguished guests to talk a little bit about HashiCorp. So, gentlemen, would you care to introduce yourselves? 

Armon Dadgar: Sure. Armon Dadgar, one of the co-founders and CTO of HashiCorp. 

Steve: Awesome. 

Tarun Chopra: I’m Tarun Chopra, I’m the HashiCorp integration executive for IBM. 

Steve: Awesome. Okay. So the first question I think is the logical place to start, which is that the acquisition of HashiCorp took a little longer, certainly than I expected from an analyst perspective, but it’s now complete. So I think the question for a lot of folks is structurally, what’s that going to look like? Is it going to be sort of the Red Hat model or other plans? So what can you tell us about how HashiCorp is going to be run moving forward? 

Tarun: Yeah, I think, you know, we’re going to keep HashiCorp as part of IBM, not an independent entity as Red Hat. But over the years, we have also learned a lot of lessons bringing Red Hat into the fold. So we’re going to keep the independence of HashiCorp intact, that whether it be in our products, the marketing, the sales, so forth and so on. But from a customer perspective, they should be getting one IBM experience with HashiCorp. 

Steve: Awesome. So moving forward, obviously, Hashi has a wider sort of array of assets that developers and sort of other practitioners have used for years. What is the plan in terms of investing in Hashi’s products moving forward? You know, how can IBM sort of jumpstart things or move things forward? 

Armon: So I think honestly, what’s worked really well about IBM as a home for HashiCorp is kind of two things. One, which is there’s, I think, a great alignment on the mission, right? So if we think about kind of what was discussed today at the keynote, the broader IBM mission is really evolving to being the hybrid enabler. So I think within that context, the whole HashiCorp portfolio remains relevant. 

Steve: Yeah. 

Armon: So rather than say, okay, well, maybe these two products remain relevant to the mission, but these other things don’t really fit anymore. Really, everything still fits. So I think then from an investment perspective, there’s a clear interest across the entirety of the portfolio. So I think obviously the core products, Terraform, Vault continue to get, you know, lion’s share of investment. But I think if we look at things like, you know, there’s a big focus on identity-based security within IBM when you look at things like Verify. So there’s a logical synergy to Boundary and Vault and Radar when we look at that portfolio. Same thing with data posture management with Guardium. Fits nicely with Radar and Vault. If we look at things like Nomad and Console, there’s a natural fit to like the high-performance compute business IBM already has. So almost across the entirety of the portfolio, there’s a very logical fit both into the broader IBM mission, but also synergy across existing IBM products. So, you know, I think we’re in a four-trip position that it makes sense to kind of continue investing across all of it. 

Steve: So that actually segues nicely into the next question, which is sort of how does all this come together? So you talked about how this fits within obviously the IBM portfolio. What about other pieces like with Red Hat and so on? So how does, you know, when we sit back and think about what things are going to look like moving forward over the next, say, 12 to 18 months, right? How does it all come together and what does it look like? 

Armon: The way I think about it is if I take a step back, it’s how do we enable that hybrid cloud operating model, which has at least three discrete layers. At the base is the hybrid infrastructure, and there’s the hybrid middleware and data pieces, and then it’s hybrid automation and insight on top. So across that whole thing, I think Hashi’s portfolio very clearly fits in the top. But then the value is how do you drive the deep integrations? So when we talk with like Red Hat, for example, it’s okay, Vault needs to be tightly integrated with OpenShift. Ansible needs to be tightly integrated with Terraform and Vault so that we can say, okay, at the automation layer, we’re tightly connecting into that infrastructure layer. So great, wherever you’re running around OpenShift, we’re right there with you, right? If you’re doing end-to-end infrastructure as code, Terraform, Vault, Ansible all play nicely together. 

Then I think when we look at that middleware layer across the IBM Red Hat portfolio, there’s a lot of opportunities to sort of tie in the Hashi products to make sure they work across that hybrid estate. And then across the automation portfolio, I think there’s whole gaps that we’ve never solved for things like FinOps. Where there’s this logical fit where you say, okay, great, you’re using Terraform to deploy everything in cloud. But if over here on the right side, I’m using Appdio and Turbonomic and, you know, those tools to do cost management, optimization, chargeback. Why is it sort of left hand and right hand? Those things should be sort of logically coupled to say, okay, set a control and enforce it in Terraform. So if I sort of zoom out and say, okay, 18 months from now, where do we want to be? We want to not sell you a bunch of individual products, but sell a solution, which is, hey, you want to do infrastructure as code with FinOps. Okay, there’s a suite of products that make that happen, but it’s an end-to-end integrated solution. You want to do end-to-end IAC. Okay, there’s Ansible and Terraform and Packer and all these products, but it’s about end-to-end infrastructure as code with self-service for developers. Same thing if you say I want hybrid, OpenShift running everywhere with secure by default. Okay, it’s OpenShift everywhere with vault tightly tied in, automated with Terraform and Ansible. So it’s really elevating into what are those sort of hybrid workflows and workloads that we’re enabling. And then there’s going to be a suite of products behind that that really support it. 

Steve: Yep.

Tarun: I mean, I think Armon summed it up very nicely. I think that’s the number one question actually I get from clients and customers as well. And I just to kind of just my perspective on that, you know, from a customer lens perspective, the three things at IBM we are working on, right? One is major investment on HashiCorp products as it is as the second question that you asked Armon, right? In terms of the investment. So investment, huge investments in Terraform, Vault and other products that we have. We have no desire to kill any of those products. So we’re going to keep the portfolio intact in a way. The second piece of the puzzle as Armon talked about, huge integration between HashiCorp and Red Hat. And part of the challenge is not just the product integration, but we have done a lot of work, you know, as you started the conversation, took us 12 months to get to this point. But that also gave us a lot of planning time, you know, to plan a little bit, right? So part of the puzzle is also the go to market. You know, how does Red Hat, IBM HashiCorp come in front of the customers in terms of papers, contracts, sales incentives, so forth and so on. And the third piece of the puzzle, as Armon said, is, you know, what are the various pieces of IBM portfolio? For example, we just recently brought three major products into mainframes, right? Right. Vault is running a mainframe. Terraform is managing a mainframe. Nomad is running into mainframes. So that was a very quick innovation we brought on the portfolio. So from a customer lens, HashiCorp portfolio as it is, major investment, Red Hat, and then I will say the third piece, the IBM, where we can bring synergies in the fold over the next 12, 18 months of innovation that I foresee in the horizon. 

Steve: Makes perfect sense. And that’s been Think 2025 at the Heinz Convention Center here in Boston. Thanks so much. 

Armon & Tarun: Thank you.