[manquer]

Many options , older companies like IBM, Google, SAP, Oracle or even Salesforce (already own heroku in dev tooling space so not far fetched ) with stable or slowing market presence in engineering departments

Mid sized newer companies likes Hashicorp or datadog or vercel who target developers as customers .

Gitlab gives access to a large audience of developers to cross sell most dev tools so all these orgs can get a lot of returns paying more than the standalone value of gitlab itself.

The best fit would be companies like Hashicorp who have strong open source pedigree so users won’t be turned off and leave

[susanthenerd]

> The best fit would be companies like Hashicorp who have strong open source pedigree so users won’t be turned off and leave

HashiCorp might not be the best fit anymore. Last year, they switched to a license that isn't open source: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37081306

[breadandcheese]

Did I miss something? Didn't IBM acquire Hashicorp?

[manquer]

Yes they did, i should have clarified, as IBM is becoming like Broadcom as an umbrella organization for all sorts of companies, the ibm core is different beast than some of the acquisitions they have been making

In my mind just like LinkedIn , GitHub and Microsoft are every distinct entities with a lot of differences on how they work , Hashicorp and IBM parent are different and will remain so. Integrating into Hashicorp for Gitlab would be very different than integrating into IBM core with different values for both businesses .

[firesteelrain]

GitLab Premium already integrates with HashiCorp Vault [1]

GitLab supports storing the Terraform state and includes Terraform templates however they are moving to OpenTofu in 18.x [2]

1. https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/ci/secrets/hashicorp_vault.html 2. https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/update/deprecations.html

[manquer]

I wasn't thinking about a few focused features or integrations, but more generally. i.e non product things like sales and license packaging and son on.

If an acquisition has to make sense there should be a clear path to monetize it, for IBM core or its HashiCorp unit or any other buyer that will not just be through some light integrations alone, they can achieved with partnerships after all you don't need to buy the organization for it.

[firesteelrain]

Agree. What did you have in mind? The two products are already lightly integrated.

[bigfatkitten]

Salesforce let Heroku wither and die. I don't see them sticking their toes into the dev tooling space again anytime soon.