RESEARCH TRIANGLE PARK – Arvind Krishna is continuing to build up IBM’s arsenal for competition in the cloud computing wars, this time taking his deal-making offensive to Spain to buy consulting firm Bluetab Solutions Group.

The IBM chair and CEO has expanded Big Blue with nine acquisitions so far this year – including one by Raleigh-based Red Hat, a firm he helped acquire three years ago when the cloud move launched. IBM also acquired a company in December 2020.

Bluetab, which is based in Spain, is to become part of IBM’s consulting practices focusing on data, artificial intelligence and hybrid cloud.

IBM, which operates one of its largest corporate campuses in RTP, also is preparing to split the company, spinning off its managed services group later this year under the name Kyndryl.

Financial terms were not disclosed.

IBM continues acquisition binge, buying firm focusing on cloud, IT services

“The outside-in digital transformation of the past is giving way to the inside-out potential of using company-owned data with AI and automation to generate business value and create intelligent workflows,” said Mark Foster, Senior Vice President, for IBM Services and Global Business Services, in a statement. “Our acquisition of Bluetab will fuel migration to the cloud and help our clients to realize even more value from their mission-critical data.”

IBM has said it acquired Red Hat in order to capitalize on what it saw as a $1 trillion opportunity. In data services, IBM sees more growth looming. Citing research information from Gartner, IBM pointed out that data and analytics serives are expected to rise to $232 billion by 2024, growing from $123 billion in 2020.

Bluetab also expands IBM services reach in Spain, Mexico, Colombia and Peru.

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The Bluetab deal comes just days after IBM bought Maryland-based BoxBoat Technologies.

Here’s a list of IBM’s deals as reported by ChannelE2E:

  • 4. July 2021: BoxBoat Technologies for DevOps and Kubernetes container expertise.
  • 13. May 2021: Certain data protection & storage tools from Catalogic Software.
  • 12. May 2021: Salesforce cloud consulting partner Waeg.
  • 11. April 2021: Turbonomic, an application resource management (ARM) and network performance management (NPM) software provider.
  • 10. April 2021: myInvenio, a business automation software provider that specializes in process mining as part of the hyperautomation trend.
  • 9. January 2021: Red Hat, owned by of IBM, acquired StackRox, a provider of container and Kubernetes-native security software.
  • 8. January 2021: Taos, a Top 250 Public Cloud MSP as ranked by ChannelE2E.
  • 7. January 2021: 7Summits for Salesforce cloud consulting expertise
  • 6. December 2020: Nordcloud for cloud consulting, migration and transformation capabilities.