IBM continues to boost its assets in the cloud and AI fields.
Cloud Computing Continues to Climb
At the end of 2020 Gartner expected cloud end-user spending to bump up by 18.4% in 2021, to a total of $304.9 billion. The pandemic made cloud computing even more attractive, as companies looked to give their employees access from anywhere. Customers and employees both want fast access to high performance and scalable software and services.
Back in 2019 Ben Nye from Turbonomic talked about his average customer. He said they’re usually chief information officers with fifty-year-old data centers faced with a choice. Running their data networks is an expensive proposition, and moving everything to the cloud and renting digital space is also expensive. He quoted another Gartner article that said most IT customers’ first cloud bill was more than three times the expected cost. Turbonomic can bring value by using a hybrid-cloud model for workload optimization. He used the analogy of using EZ Pass instead of waiting in line to pay a toll.
IBM Announces the Planned Acquisition of Turbonomic
Recently, IBM announced plans to acquire Turbonomic as another piece of its hybrid-cloud automation network. Using Turbonomic’s Application Resource Management (ARM) and Network Performance Management (NPM) capabilities, IBM will build a better Artificial Intelligence Operations Network (AIOps) for their hybrid cloud customers.
Rob Thomas, Senior Vice President, IBM Cloud and Data Platform said, “The Turbonomic acquisition is yet another example of our commitment to making the most impactful investments to advance this strategy and ensure customers find the most innovative ways to fuel their digital transformations” as the company shifts its focus toward being a hybrid cloud and AI behemoth. The hope is that each new software acquisition will let its customers scale up faster and more efficiently. Much of the new companies that IBM obtains will be built on the RedHat platform, another acquisition that IBM announced earlier this year. This gives IBM and its customers the ability to run on any cloud immediately.
Turbonomic also includes ParkMyCloud, a cost optimization tool. ParkMyCloud says that $21 billion was wasted on resources that are unused or over specified. ParkMyCloud gives users utilization data for all of their resources, and recommends when unused services should be switched off. The other side of the business is rightsizing, taking a look at how much cloud capacity a company needs and making sure they’re downsizing where extra space is sitting idle but still costing money. Their website hosts a checklist of twenty six steps that can reduce cloud waste and optimize speed.
Supply and Demand in the Realm of Information Technology
This new piece of the IBM cloud puzzle also gives it capabilities to work between business and information technology in an area that many competitors haven’t yet reached. Dinesh Nirmal, the General Manager of Cloud Automation, likens the process to supply and demand. Every organization needs to find the balance between the supply of its information technology resources and the demands of its users at any given time. Ideally a company will release a new application and create a run of demand for it, but will need to be ready with enough resources to make sure that its engineers and IT workers aren’t troubleshooting outages and putting out fires. This is where IBM can use its new ARM tools to match its resources with the applications where they are needed.
Turbonomic’s story told through new articles is impressive, dating back to 2013. Features are added to its software, other companies are purchased, and valuations go up and up until this final chapter of acquisition. IBM has an impressive automation enterprise already, and these consistent additions help it to be a solid supplier of cloud computing, hybrid cloud computing and artificial intelligence computing. This latest announcement and the fortification of its AIOps arm should only help to attract more customers and offer more services.
