Should VMware buy Hashicorp?
VMware will have new found freedom come November 1st. What should they do with it?
Back in December of 2019, VMware closed on what felt like a shotgun acquisition of Pivotal. If you remember the history of Pivotal, it was the bits and pieces of VMware that Pat Gelsinger didn’t want when he became CEO. For the record, I wasn’t a fan of Gelsinger getting rid of Cloud Foundry. I was proved wrong. Pat had a fantastic run at VMware, and Pivotal never became the break-out success I predicted. So, take my acquisition advice with a grain of salt.
I’ve been going back and forth with VMware over Tanzu and Cross-Cloud Services. However, when I think of an established platform, I think of Openshift. IBM has done a strong job marketing Openshift as a platform to build and manage cloud-native applications. All things needed to package, test, deploy, and manage applications across clouds are in Openshift. You may or may not like the services, but they are there in a cohesive format.
This gets me back to VMware’s Tanzu and Cross-Cloud Services. Most of all of these products are acquisitions. VMware has loosely coupled it into the Tanzu architecture. Tanzu is less cohesive than Openshift. At least from a marketecture perspective. Now couple Cross-Cloud Services.
It has me considering what happens when you bring Nomad, Terraform, and Vault to the VMware portfolio? Hashicorp has a well-thought-out platform. VMware has a massive channel to sell the vision. What happens if VMware made Hashicorp an offer it couldn’t refuse, paid using stock? The only VMware investor challenge I see is Michael Dell’s 51% stake in VMware being diluted.
A consistent question I received via Twitter, what’s in it for Hashicorp? Growing an open-source company is hard. The poster child is Red Hat, and they never got that big in revenue compared to VMware. VMware took Nicira and built it into VMware NSX. I think the same can occur with Hashicorp. Then, of course, there are the bits about whether Hashicorp/VMware can maintain the business relationships with cloud providers and other ISV.