RESEARCH TRIANGLE PARK – IBM continues to acquire companies with cloud-based technology capabilities and services, this time buying Maryland-based BoxBoat. The deal announced Thursday will boost IBM’s hybrid cloud efforts being built around Raleigh-based Red Hat capabilities.
The buy is the eighth IBM has made since November of 2020.
“Our clients require a cloud architecture that allows them to operate across a traditional IT environment, private cloud and public clouds. That’s at the heart of our hybrid cloud approach,” said John Granger, Senior Vice President of Hybrid Cloud Services at IBM. “No cloud modernization project can succeed without a containerization strategy, and BoxBoat is at the forefront of container services innovation.”
BoxBoat is a provider of DevOps services – devops meaning a combination of information technology service and software development.
The company will become part of IBM’s Global Business Services which Big Blue is in the process of spinning off as a separate venture.
IBM, which acquired Red Hat three years ago for $34 billion, is focusing its cloud efforts on hybrid offerings – a mixture of public and private clouds – built around Red Hat technology.
IBM likely a contender for new Pentagon cloud contract after $10B deal cancelled
Financial terms were not disclosed.
BoxBoat launched in 2016.
“This news follows IBM’s acquisition of leading cloud services firms – Nordcloud and Taos – which closed in the first quarter of 2021 and significantly expanded IBM’s multicloud transformation, management expertise and capabilities,” IBM noted.
BoxBoat’s specialties include containers – “a standard unit of software that packages up code and all its dependencies so the application runs quickly and reliably from one computing environment to another” – and open source software Kubernetes for deploying and managing containers. IBM sees these as being keys to helping companies digitize operations.
Kubernetes and Containers Are Leading Drivers of Digital Transformation
Containers and Kubernetes are two of the leading drivers of enterprise digital transformation.
“Software application containerization makes life easier for developers by further abstracting computing infrastructure, and adoption of enterprise container platforms is on the rise,” IBM noted.
“By 2025, more than 85 percent of global organizations will be running containerized applications in production, which is a significant increase from fewer than 35 percent in 2019.2 At the same time, Kubernetes — open source software for deploying and managing those containers — is rapidly becoming the preferred way to build digital services at scale and across clouds.”
IBM also pointed to a report from StackRox last fall that found “91 percent of organizations are leveraging Kubernetes to orchestrate containers, and 75 percent of organizations are actively using Kubernetes in production.”
IBM operates one of its largest corporate campuses in RTP and owns Raleigh-based Red Hat.
