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Comment by jsiepkes | Hacker News Reader

Interesting. I'm curious, was it fear of IBM or was there a concrete threat from IBM which was already eating Hashicorp's lunch and was an existential threat?

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?

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IBM has lots of old enterprise mindshare. Existing relationships are the value. Selling Vault just becomes another line item in your IBM contract.

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)

There’s even a whole cottage business around getting your app on the AWS marketplace and handling billing through AWS. Once it’s on the marketplace it becomes much more appealing to a set of B2B customers because it’s way easier internally to just add some $X,000 line item to your AWS ‘cloud’ bill than to go though the lengthy procurement and approval process of onboarding a new vendor

“Application Modernization” is a huge deal in enterprise. In practice this means some combination of “make it slightly easier to get production traffic to new Java apps” and “deploy a lot of Kubernetes clusters.” Really they want the former but the k8s became a proxy for the capability. It’s why IBM bought RedHat.

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.

> why anyone would choose IBM's offering over Hashicorp's offering

Because everyone know IBM and mostly only devs know about Hashicorp. There is that saying "No one ever got fired for buying IBM".

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