What is amusing is that most of the public response has been aimed at Terraform whilst internally Terraform wasn't the concern. Gruntworks and the others were not mentioned internally.
It was Vault. It was IBM.
But your reasoning at the end was not my understanding.
That said, I have nothing but respect for my former colleagues there. Some of the best engineers have I worked with are still at Hashicorp. :-)
Disclaimer: Views my own, not that of any past, present, or future employer.
I have a hard time imagining why anyone would choose IBM's offering over Hashicorp's offering unless they would already be up until their necks into IBM stuff. I also wouldn't really expect the IBM and Hashicorp customer base to overlap much?
Because everyone know IBM and mostly only devs know about Hashicorp. There is that saying "No one ever got fired for buying IBM".
Very similar how AWS just repackages open source products and sells them themselves (Elastic). If you don’t protect yourself from these entrenched enterprise marketing machines, you’re dead.
(Brought Vault into an old, stodgy org, was a schlep)
Hashicorp products are a very big part of this world. I’d expect that basically every IBM customer also uses Hashicorp products, but they may or may not have a commercial relationship with Hashicorp.