IBM Buys Snowflake Expert Hakkoda To Speed Data Modernization For AI
April 8, 2025 Timothy Prickett Morgan
The company may be best known for selling systems and software, but IBM still has a pretty large consultancy and services business even after spinning off a lot of outsource and hosting businesses as Kyndryl several years ago. Expertise is important to any consultancy, which means having the knowledge about how to solve pesky problems that can be applied to many clients, speeding up their projects and bolstering IBM’s revenues and profits.
That, in a nutshell, is what IBM’s acquisition of Hakkoda, consultancy founded as a partner to help IT shops move to Snowflake, the cloudy data warehouse system provider, is all about.
Hakkoda took its name from the snowy – and occasionally volcanic – mountain range at the northern tip of the main Japanese island of Honshu, which is one of the snowiest places (still left) on Earth and known for backcountry skiing. The company is located in New York City, and has its characteristic bluntness in the way that it describes itself:
“It’s like Hakkoda the company – it’s where the experts go to do cool shit. Hakkoda is providing a new way forward for organizations struggling to adapt in a data-first world. We help our customers navigate challenges around talent acquisition, overcome legacy thinking, and start leveraging Big Data and AI to enhance business outcomes. Hakkoda is providing a new way forward for organizations struggling to adapt in a data-first world. We help our customers navigate challenges around talent acquisition, overcome legacy thinking, and start leveraging Big Data and AI to enhance business outcomes.”
I didn’t think people said Big Data any more. Data is always embiggening. It is what data does. That’s why we just say “data analytics,” because that always implies either a lot of data, fast data, or both.
Hakkoda was founded in 2021 by Erik Duffield, formerly general manager and director of the experience management platform at Deloitte Digital, a brand management arm of the Deloitte consultancy conglomerate, and before that chief executive officer at Appirio, an IT consulting company specializing in helping companies move to Salesforce.com CRM based in Indianapolis. Appirio was acquired by Indian consultancy Wipro for $500 million, and it looks like Duffield wanted to get back to running his own show after being at Deloitte for two and a half years.
Duffield was joined in founding Hakkoda by Patrick Buell, who started his career two decades ago as a data analyst and ETL developer and eventually was the principal architect and pharmacy data warehouse director at healthcare provider Kaiser Permanente before joining Hakkoda as its chief innovation officer. The third co-founder of the startup is chief revenue officer Ryan Tucker, who was in charge of the Workday practice at Appirio when Duffield was running it.
As far as we know, Hakkoda has raised an unknown amount of angel funding and raised $5.6 million in Series A funding in the summer of 2021. The company has “hundreds of experts” in New York and Costa Rica, where it has a center of excellence because that Central American country is in the US Eastern time zone. Duffield says in a company blog that setting up operations in India can be less costly, but the time zone changes make it very hard to get things done. That said, Hakkoda has operations in India as well as in the United Kingdom and throughout Europe. (We strongly suspect that a lot of people work from home, in fact. Which was a founding principle for Hakkoda.)
Hakkoda has expertise in financial services, government, life sciences, and healthcare, and obviously, IBM Consulting (formerly IBM Global Business Services) has deep expertise in those and other fields. We wonder if IBM is buying Hakkoda as much to help transform its own data and operations for internal AI services that will drive its businesses and presumably do a lot of work that people do today. Having done that, IBM can help others do the same at their companies.
Under normal circumstances, we might have thought that Hakkoda would have spent the next four years raising progressively large chunks of venture capital in a desire to eventually go public or sell for what would be a presumably much larger number than Big Blue very likely paid to acquire it now. Given the uncertainty in the global economy and IBM’s clear needs to build out its Snowflake consulting practice and to get more AI-specific data migration and management expertise, you can’t blame the Hakkoda founders for seeking a safe port in this storm.
