Overview:
On July 8 & 15, 2021, IBM announced that it had entered into agreements to acquire BoxBoat and Bluetab, respectively. While BoxBoat is a DevOps consultancy and enterprise Kubernetes certified service provider, Bluetab is a data and hybrid cloud consulting services provider.
Through these acquisitions, IBM continues to advance its hybrid cloud strategy by expanding its service offerings and geographical footprint. Financial details of both transactions were not disclosed.
About BoxBoat:
Founded in 2016, BoxBoat is a leading hybrid cloud consulting firm specializing in DevOps and enterprise Kubernetes certified services.
Its customers include several Fortune 100 companies and government clients. It has partnerships with AWS, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform.
It is based in Bethesda, MD with 5 additional offices across US.
About Bluetab:
Founded in 2006, Bluetab is a data and hybrid cloud consulting firm. It has developed Truedat, an open-source data governance tool for data management.
It helps enterprises extract more value from their data by transforming their on-premise data and analytics estates to hybrid multi-cloud data platforms leveraging its experience with major public cloud providers and technologies including Red Hat OpenShift.
It is headquartered in Madrid, Spain with offices in Mexico, Colombia and Peru.
IBM’s hybrid cloud strategy:
Since IBM’s acquisition of RedHat in 2019, IBM has focused on growing its hybrid cloud business. It has been augmenting its capabilities inorganically to gain market share in the $200 billion cloud professional services market(1).
BoxBoat and Bluetab augment IBM’s application containerization, DevOps and data cloud offerings as well as bring leading brands across industries onboard.
These acquisitions follow IBM’s recent acquisitions of leading cloud services firms – Nordcloud, a Helsinki, Finland-based cloud implementation, application transformation and managed services company and Taos, a San Jose, CA-based provider of cloud professional and managed services – which significantly expanded IBM's multi-cloud transformation and management expertise.
IBM has also been investing in its Cloud Pak platform, centered around Kubernetes, which allows companies to create a consistent platform across multiple public cloud service providers and enables their applications to work seamlessly across these heterogeneous environments. In the past year, it has acquired application resource management (ARM) and network performance management (NPM) software provider, Turbonomic as well as application performance monitoring and observability software company, Instana to boost its hybrid cloud and AIOps capabilities.
Note:
(1) Estimate based on IDC 2024 projections for cloud managed services and professional services
The Chesapeake Group was not an advisor in these transactions.