IBM Closes Acquisition of Turbonomic to Deliver Comprehensive AIOps Capabilities for Hybrid Cloud

IBM announced the closing of its acquisition of Turbonomic, Inc., an Application Resource Management (ARM) and Network Performance Management (NPM) software provider based in Boston, MA.

The close of the acquisition complements IBM’s recent acquisition of Instana for application performance monitoring (APM) and observability, and the launch of IBM Cloud Pak for Watson AIOps to automate IT Operations using AI. IBM provides customers with AI-powered automation capabilities that span from AIOps (the use of AI to automate IT Operations) to application-centric performance and IT resources observability – all built on Red Hat OpenShift to run across any hybrid cloud environment.

“We believe that the move to AI-powered automation is essential to helping businesses succeed in a digital-first world,” said Dinesh Nirmal, General Manager, IBM Automation. “IBM is already helping thousands of customers use automation to make IT and business processes more efficient and employees more effective. Now that Turbonomic is a part of our portfolio, IBM is the only company providing a one-stop shop of AI-powered automation capabilities, all built on Red Hat OpenShift to run anywhere.”

“Today, applications run the business,” said Ben Nye, CEO, Turbonomic. “Turbonomic’s Application Resource Management assures application performance and governance so customers can focus on innovation. IBM’s acquisition of Turbonomic now helps us reach and serve more customers globally – enabling successful application hosting operations across any cloud environment.”

Global specialist insurer Hiscox, which provides a diverse portfolio of insurance and reinsurance products across geographies, has been working with Turbonomic for several years to support business growth and innovation.

“Our application of Turbonomic has helped Hiscox to innovate and drive business efficiency as we look to dynamically manage what I call the axis of application performance, compliance and availability of systems,” said Ian Penny, Group Chief Information Officer at Hiscox. “The combination of Turbonomic and IBM will be a gamechanger for application management in an ever more complex hybrid cloud world and we look forward to continuing to benefit from this partnership.”

The close of the acquisition builds on IBM’s growing investment in its ecosystem of business partners, such as Cisco, to help customers accelerate their journey to hybrid cloud and AI. Turbonomic has built and will continue to grow an OEM relationship with Cisco through Cisco Intersight. Turbonomic capabilities add value to the Cisco Intersight Workload Optimizer, providing users with a top-down, application-driven approach to ensure applications continually get the resources they need to perform.

“IBM and Cisco have a long-standing strategic partnership spanning more than 20 years to provide technology, services and industry expertise to our mutual customers,” said Todd Nightingale, EVP and GM, Enterprise Networking and Cloud, Cisco. “Cisco Intersight is valuable to our customers because of its openness and flexibility across hybrid cloud environments. We look forward to growing and investing in this partnership together to continue to drive innovation that supports our customers’ future cloud journeys.”

As adoption of hybrid cloud continues to grow, companies often face high costs associated with managing performance and availability for multiple applications sharing an increasingly complex hybrid cloud environment. Given these challenges, organizations are using AI with full stack observability and visibility into their IT resources so they can deliver high availability and performance of applications at lower costs and minimize troubleshooting and downtime.

In addition, Turbonomic ARM will continue to expand its support for infrastructure and services for all of the major public clouds, including IBM Cloud, and provide recommendations and automation for a wider set of enterprise applications, software and PaaS services. This is designed to help businesses predictively automate resourcing actions to optimize cost savings, reduce their carbon footprint, handle demand spikes with no degradation of end user response time and help deliver quicker resolution of incidents. This can also be used to help businesses place workloads appropriately so that they can achieve their regulatory and compliance requirements and maintain data and application governance across the full stack of IT resources.

With demand for 5G adoption rising, enterprises are also looking to move workloads to the edge. This is driving networking to be an integral component of the application deployment strategy.  With this acquisition, IBM will leverage Turbonomic’s NPM products and strong presence in the telecommunications industry to complement its own offerings and expertise in this area, helping customers intelligently optimize applications running in 5G environments. 

Today’s news underscores IBM’s focus on providing organizations with a one-stop shop of AI-powered automation capabilities for business and IT all built on Red Hat OpenShift. This strategy is designed to help businesses automate their entire enterprise, from robotic process automation (RPA) and AIOps to ARM and process mining. Over the last year, IBM has made bold moves including acquisitions of Turbonomic, myInvenio, Instana and WDG Automation; ecosystem partnerships; and organic R&D including the launch of Cloud Pak for Watson AIOps and IBM Watson Orchestrate.