IBM Expands Hybrid Cloud Strategy With Gravitant Deal
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IBM expanded its cloud and enterprise services offerings this week with the latest in a series of acquisitions designed to propel its hybrid cloud strategy.
IBM (NYSE: IBM) said Tuesday (Nov. 3) it has acquired privately held Gravitant Inc., a developer of hybrid cloud "brokerage" software that allows customers to buy software and computing services from multiple suppliers across hybrid clouds. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.
IBM asserts that the accelerating enterprise shift to hybrid cloud services will require vendors to provide a menu of options for managing their cloud environments. "The reality of enterprise IT is that it is many clouds with many characteristics, whether they be economic, capacity or security," Martin Jetter, IBM's senior vice president for Global Technology Services, noted in a statement announcing the Gravitant acquisition.
The deal is the latest in a series of cloud and big data acquisitions by IBM in recent months as it fleshes out its hybrid cloud strategy and, in the case of last week's deal to acquire the Weather Company, create new data-intensive cloud applications. All are part of a strategy to attract more customers to the IBM Cloud as the struggling company seeks to boost it cloud infrastructure and software services business.
IBM said it plans to integrate Gravitant into its Global Technology Services unit and fold the new brokerage capabilities into the IBM Cloud as software-as-a-service offerings.
The deal also reflects the growing need to mix and match cloud platforms in which different workloads require different levels of performance and efficiency. For example, mission critical workloads like transaction processing would get highest priority in a hybrid cloud environment.
Gravitant is headquartered in Austin, Texas, and has development operations in India. According to the web site crunchbase.com, the cloud broker founded in 2004 had raised about $40 million in three rounds of venture funding. The company's IT-as-a-service offerings are built around its cloudMatrix cloud services brokerage and management platform.
The deal is the latest in about two-dozen cloud-related acquisitions by IBM over the last three years, including its $2 billion acquisition of SoftLayer in 2013. The company's two-pronged strategy also includes expansion of its Bluemix application development platform. "IBM continues to make a mix of acquisitive and R&D investments aligned to higher value capabilities such as data," the company added in a statement.
The strategy aims to ease the transition to hybrid clouds by allowing customers to focus on application development using Bluemix and IBM Watson tools along with third party and open-source APIs. The new cloud brokering capability would extend IBM's IT-as-service portfolio, allowing it to make good on its claim that it can handle infrastructure issues while customers focus on developing and deploying new data-driven applications.
