AI

IBM snaps up Instana to continue its hybrid cloud and AI quest

IBM has struck a deal to buy application performance monitoring company Instana, which marked its latest investment in hybrid cloud and AI capabilities. Terms of the deal, which is expected to close over the coming months, weren't disclosed.

With Instana, IBM will be able help companies overcome the challenge of managing application performance across multiple teams, and across two to 15 clouds, on average.

"Our clients today are faced with managing a complex technology landscape filled with mission-critical applications and data that are running across a variety of hybrid cloud environments – from public clouds, private clouds and on-premises," said IBM's Rob Thomas, senior vice president, cloud and data platform, in a statement. "IBM's acquisition of Instana is yet another important step that we are taking to provide companies with the most complete portfolio of AI-automated solutions to tackle this enormous challenge and help prevent unforeseen IT incidents that can cost a business in lost revenue and reputation."

According to Crunchbase, Instana was founded in 2015 by Mirko Novakovic, Pete Abrams, Fabian Lange, and Pavlo Baron. Headquartered in Chicago, with a development center in Germany, Instana provides businesses with capabilities to manage the performance of cloud-native applications no matter where they reside – on mobile devices, public and private clouds and on-premises.

Instana's enterprise observability platform automatically can build up a contextual understanding of cloud applications and then provide actionable insights to indicate how to best prevent and remedy IT issues.

Once Instana's capabilities are integrated into IBM, companies will be able to feed those insights into Watson AIOps. The data could then be compared to a baseline of a normal operating application, with AI triggering alerts to resolve issues before there are negative impacts to that transaction or activity.

IBM said the combined platform could eliminate the need for IT staff to manually monitor and manage applications, freeing these employees to focus on innovation and higher value work. 

RELATED: IBM snags SAP consulting partner TruQua

IBM's deal to buy Instana followed on the heels of Monday's news that Big Blue was buying SAP partner TruQua Enterprise for an undisclosed sum.

IBM CEO Arvind Krishna, who was formerly in charge of IBM's cloud division prior to taking over as CEO in April, has doubled-down on IBM's hybrid cloud business as it seeks to close the gap on market leaders Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and Google.

Last month, IBM announced it was splitting into two companies by the end of next year in order to double down on its high margin cloud growth.