IBM HAS ACQUIRED Blue Box in an attempt to make its cloud offering even bluer. The Seattle-based company specialises in simple service-as-a-platform clouds based on OpenStack.
This, of course, fits in with IBM’s new direction of a Power PC, OpenStack cloud-based world, as demonstrated by its collaboration with MariaDB on TurboLAMP.
IBM’s move to the cloud is starting to pay off, seeing revenue of $7.7bn in the 12 months to March 2015 and growing more than 16 percent in the first quarter of this year.
The company plans to use the new acquisition to create rapid, integrating cloud-based applications and on-premise systems within the OpenStack managed cloud.
Blue Box also brings a remotely managed OpenStack to provide customers with a local cloud, better visibility control and tighter security.
“IBM is dedicated to helping our clients migrate to the cloud in an open, secure, data rich environment that meets their current and future business needs,” said IBM general manager of cloud services Jim Comfort.
“The acquisition of Blue Box accelerates IBM’s open cloud strategy, making it easier for our clients to move data and applications across clouds and adopt hybrid cloud environments.”
Blue Box will offer customers a more cohesive, consistent and simplified experience, while at the same time integrating with existing IBM packages like the Bluemix digital innovation platform. The firm also offers a single unified control panel for customer operations.
“No brand is more respected in IT than IBM. Blue Box is building a similarly respected brand in OpenStack,” said Blue Box founder and CTO Jesse Proudman.
“Together, we will deliver the technology and products businesses need to give their application developers an agile, responsive infrastructure across public and private clouds.
“This acquisition signals the beginning of new OpenStack options delivered by IBM. Now is the time to arm customers with more efficient development, delivery and lower cost solutions than they’ve seen thus far in the market.”
IBM has confirmed that it plans to help Blue Box customers to grow their technology portfolio, while taking advantage of the broader IBM product set.
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