‘The world is really moving toward a multi-cloud era where hybrid infrastructure is the default. That requires the layers of automation to actually support that,’ says Armon Dadgar, co-founder and CTO of HashiCorp.
Armon Dadgar, co-founder and CTO of HashiCorp, took the stage at IBM Think 2025 to highlight some of the ways the Terraform creator will work well within Big Blue’s portfolio—an opportunity for solution providers of either company exploring cross-selling strategies.
Dadgar told the crowd at the annual IBM conference, held in Boston this week, that HashiCorp’s tools including Terraform will help enterprise customers overcome fragmented teams and tools that slow down productivity and raise costs and risk while navigating across private clouds, public clouds, edge IT environments and more.
“The world is really moving toward a multi-cloud era where hybrid infrastructure is the default,” Dadgar said. “That requires the layers of automation to actually support that. … Almost every single organization that we work with talks about their cost overruns when they operate these environments because they lack the right level of visibility and control over it.”
[RELATED: IBM Think 2025: CEO Krishna Says Customer AI Success Rate Can Triple With Big Blue Approach]
HashiCorp And IBM
IBM closed on the $6.4 billion HashiCorp acquisition in February, and the two organizations continue to integrate various products in their portfolios as well as integrating HashiCorp tools with IBM subsidiary Red Hat.
HashiCorp can also help with standardizing workflows, unifying platforms and managing resources at the source code layer, the infrastructure layer and security data including credentials and certificates.
“It’s not just about the creation of the application or the creation of the infrastructure day one,” he said. “There’s a full life-cycle day two, day three and beyond that we really need to manage in a consistent way. … I need my developers to easily be able to spin up these environments, but I also want to make sure that they spin them down so that I don’t pay for that bill six months later because someone had a test environment that they set up.”
HashiCorp customers have taken 45-minute average deployment times down to three minutes and the time from idea inception to production to hours down from months—all important efficiencies should IBM Chairman and CEO Arvind Krishna’s prediction for 1 billion new applications built with generative AI prove correct.
Partner Opportunity
Dadgar previously told CRN in an interview after IBM’s acquisition that he hopes the go-to-market and innovation scale the mainframe giant brings HashiCorp more channel interest.
“The IBM stamp creates a different level of legitimacy to HashiCorp offerings, and I think we’re already seeing some of that in interactions with our bigger channel partners, like the GSIs [global system integrators] of the world,” he said. “We want to leverage IBM’s channel strength, so we’ll plug into that and enable a broader range of partners.”
The HashiCorp CTO said that IBM and Red Hat partners that are seeing a burst of activity from VMware customers looking for an alternative option for virtualization can also leverage Terraform tools to make the migration easier.
For security solution providers, HashiCorp Vault and Boundary can be leveraged to move customers to identity-based models and maybe leave firewalls and perimeters, he said.
Dadgar also saw ways for the technology to work alongside IBM’s financial operations portfolio for better control at the start of a development cycle, potentially avoiding wasteful spending on test environments no longer in use.
“For our channel partners, this is a big opportunity for them as well to say, ‘OK, let’s come in and help implement cloud done right,’” he said. “That’s a message that resonates with the CFO as well as it does to the CIO.”