RESEARCH TRIANGLE PARK – IBM is continuing a relentless push to grow its cloud business, announcing Wednesday its plans to acquire Instana, a provider of application monitoring firm.

The Chicago-based company, which launched in 2015, offers technology and solutions that IBM says will help it provide better cloud management services for clients. Instana provides both software-as-a-service and onsite solutions.

IBM is in the process of splitting into two companies, one focused on cloud and artificial intelligence, the other geared to services, as part of its effort to seize cloud opportunities.

Earlier this week IBM said it was acquiring another Chicago-based company – TruQua Enterprises – which focuses on finance and analytics solutions and has a lengthy list of Fortune 500 clients.

“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,” says Rob Thomas, senior vice president for Cloud and Data Platform at IBM. “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.”


How Instana works

“Automatic, Continuous Discovery of Your Full Application Stack”

  • A single, lightweight agent per host continually discovers all components and deploys sensors crafted to monitor each technology
  • With no human intervention, sensors automatically collect configuration, changes, metrics, and events
  • Metrics from all components are collected in high fidelity with 1 second data granularity
  • Every request is traced across each microservice, automatically capturing the response time and context. No sampling, no partial traces
  • To understand how a system of services works together and the impact of component failure, Instana enhances traces with information about the underlying service, application, and system infrastructure using our Dynamic Graph

Source: Instana


IBM’s first big move to capitalize on what it sees as a $1 trillion opportunity was its $32 billion dollar acquisition of Raleigh-based Red Hat. That deal closed last year. Since then its cloud focuse has only intensified.

Instana technology enables clients to manage apps across as many as 15 “clouds” and include “multiple teams” of developers.

Big Blue also says artificial intelligence plays a crucial role in its expanding cloud offerings:

  • The launch of IBM Watson AIOps earlier this year, IBM’s AI offering for automating how enterprises self-detect, diagnose and respond to IT anomalies in real time
  • Its acquisition of WDG Automation to provide clients with broader access to intelligent automation through software robots
  • An expanded partnership with ServiceNow to develop a joint solution to help companies reduce operational risk and lower costs by applying AI to automate IT operations
  • Continued updates to IBM Cloud Pak for Automation designed to help companies drive innovation across their expanding IT environments and accelerate digital transformation.

“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 Mirko Novakovic, co-founder and CEO of Instana. “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.”

Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed. Closing is expected in the coming months.

IBM operates one of its largest corporate campuses in RTP and employs several thousand people across NC.

IBM makes another cloud deal, this time a big IT srevices and consulting firm