IBM Acquires Gravitant to Boost Hybrid Cloud Capabilities

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This article originally appeared at The WHIR

IBM has acquired cloud software developer Gravitant to improve the management and efficiency of hybrid environments for brokers and enterprise customers, the company announced Tuesday. Gravitant’s technology, which enables integration and management of mixed public and private clouds from multiple suppliers, will be integrated with the IBM Global Technology Services unit, and sold as a SaaS offering.

Gravitant solutions allow computing and software services from different suppliers to be compared by price and capabilities, as well as purchased from a central console. Once purchased, they can also be managed and offered as a service through the same console.

“The reality of enterprise IT is that it is many clouds with many characteristics, whether they be economic, capacity or security,” said Martin Jetter, Senior Vice President, Global Technology Services, IBM. “Gravitant provides an innovative approach to add choice and simplicity to how enterprises can now manage their environments. It will be a key component as we broaden our hybrid cloud services.”

The Austin-based Gravitant was founded in 2004, but took on the current form which attracted IBM in 2011 with the release of cloudMatrix. The company also has two development sites in India. Financial details of the agreement were not disclosed.

Cloud brokerage, management, and visibility products have become hot commodities as enterprises embrace some form or other of hybrid cloud. Recently Cloud Cruiser and VMware have expanded their portfolios to provide upgraded hybrid management and visibility. Red Hat acquired Ansible in October to grow its hybrid management capabilities.

Experts expect the market to grow rapidly, with IDC predicting the cloud systems management software market will hit $8.3 billion by 2019, and Gartner calling for the cloud brokerage enablement market to exceed $2 billion by 2018.

This first ran at http://www.thewhir.com/web-hosting-news/ibm-acquires-gravitant-to-boost-hybrid-cloud-capabilities