UK examines IBM’s HashiCorp acquisition

IBM’s cloud management provider HashiCorp will purchase for 6.4 billion dollars We have conveyed it to you before. According to the information shared now, this acquisition has been examined by the UK Competition and Markets Authority (CMA). The CMA is requesting feedback from the parties by January 16 to assess whether the deal will reduce market competition.

The review announced by the CMA comes nearly eight months after IBM announced its acquisition plan in April. Similarly, the US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) is also investigating this merger. CMA, until February 25 It will decide whether to approve the agreement or refer it to a “Phase 2” investigation, which is a deeper examination.

In such mergers, areas where both companies operate in the same market come to the fore. IBM and HashiCorp’s presence in the “using code as infrastructure” (IaC) segment, which has an important place in cloud infrastructure management, attracts attention. HashiCorp’s popular product Terraform offers developers the opportunity to quickly set up cloud environments with software, while the Ansible tool, which IBM acquired through its past acquisition of Red Hat, similarly enables managing the infrastructure with codes.

IBM and HashiCorp’s product portfolios also intersect in the area of ​​application orchestration. While IBM’s Red Hat OpenShift platform provides Kubernetes-based orchestration, HashiCorp’s Nomad tool is positioned as a more user-friendly alternative. Besides this, HashiCorp has various other tools that focus on security and infrastructure management.

While HashiCorp offers its products with an open source license, it also provides customers with cloud-based paid versions with more features. The company generated $173.4 million in revenue last quarter, which represents a 19 percent increase compared to the same period the previous year.