IBM acquires cloud company ‘Gravitant” to improve its cloud services

As a strategy to boost its hybrid cloud  and enterprise services, IBM acquired a privately held cloud company called Gravitant. The company develops cloud-based software to help companies plan, buy, manage or broker software and computing services from a variety of suppliers.

The technology that IBM is picking up in the deal gives Big Blue much-needed capabilities to span mixed environments of public and private clouds. Once Gravitant’s tools are integrated into IBM’s storehouse, clients will be able to integrate and manage digitally public and private clouds as single clouds, resulting in better performance and greater efficiency. “The beauty of Gravitant is that it will let a company’s employees set up and use a variety of cloud services using the same screen whether those services lie inside their own firewall, on dedicated resources run by IBM outside their firewall, or in some other public cloud”, said Don Rippert, IBM’s general manager of cloud strategy.

“The reality of enterprise IT is that it is many clouds with many characteristics, whether they be economic, capacity or security,” said Martin Jetter, senior vice president, Global Technology Services at IBM, in a statement. “Gravitant provides an innovative approach to add choice and simplicity to how enterprises can now manage their environments. It will be a key component as we broaden our hybrid cloud services.”  He added.

“We’re actually moving into a world where everything is mobile and cloud,” Zeus Kerravala, Analyst at ZK research said. “IBM is pretty weak in both those areas so it’s good to see the company bolstering its position there but I certainly expect to see more acquisitions.”

IBM plans to integrate the Gravitant capabilities into the IBM Global Technology Services unit. IBM Cloud, then, will integrate the capabilities into software-as-a-service offerings, which effectively broadens the company’s hybrid cloud solutions and capabilities.

“IBM is really still a service company. They’ve got Watson as an analytics play but most people don’t really think of IBM as a major cloud player,” Kerravala said. “I think they need to bolster their cloud presence. They need some infrastructure as well. Dell acquired EMC  and HP is building its infrastructure story to help customers build clouds. IBM is largely a professional services organization. They can’t really provide the whole solution.”