In its second acquisition this week, IBM unveiled its plan to purchase application performance monitoring (APM) specialist Instana to boost IBM’s artificial intelligence automation capabilities.
Instana, which made Gartner’s 2020 Magic Quadrant for Application Performance Monitoring, offers end-user and infrastructure monitoring as well as analytics that leverages AI to manage application performance in microservice architectures. The Germany and Chicago-based startup can also audit applications used in container orchestration.
Rob Thomas, senior vice president of IBM’s Cloud and Data Platform, said IBM will leverage Instana to help customers better manage the complexity of modern applications.
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“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 Thomas 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.”
Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed. IBM expects to close on the Instana deal within the next few months.
On Nov. 17, IBM unveiled plans to acquire TruQua Enterprises, a solution provider focused on the SAP ecosystem. With the acquisition of Chicago-based TruQua, IBM is buying a leader in SAP-based transformations in the financial, planning and analysis business, as TruQua works with customers’ CFOs and controllers to help them implement and optimize financial-focused technology.
By 2025, approximately 50 percent of new cloud-native application monitoring solutions will use open-source instead of vendor-specific agents to boost interoperability, up from only 5 percent in 2019, according to IT research firm Gartner. Instana‘s platform automatically builds a deep understanding of cloud applications and provides actionable insights on how to prevent and remedy issues such as slow response times, services that aren’t working or infrastructure that is down.
Once Instana’s capabilities are integrated into IBM, companies will be able to feed these insights into Watson AIOps, said Instana CEO Mirko Novakovic.
“With the added responsibility of ensuring the build and run quality of the software they develop, DevOps teams need a new generation of application performance monitoring and observability capabilities to succeed,” said Novakovic in a statement. ”Instana‘s observability capabilities combined with IBM’s AI-powered automation capabilities across hybrid cloud environments will give clients a full view of their application performance to best optimize operations.”
Instana has roughly 100 employees across the globe and has raised $57 million from investors since it was founded in 2015.