IBM has announced a definitive agreement to acquire Instana, an application performance monitoring and observability company. The aim is to help businesses better manage the complexity of modern applications that span the hybrid cloud landscape. Headquartered in Chicago, with a development center in Germany, Instana provides businesses with capabilities to manage the performance of complex and modern cloud-native applications no matter where they reside—on mobile devices, public and private clouds, and on-premise, including IBM Z.
IBM says the acquisition further advances IBM's Hybrid Cloud and AI strategy and strengthens its AI-powered automation capabilities. Financial details were not disclosed.
With the acquisition of Instana, IBM will help companies overcome the challenge of managing application performance across multiple teams, and across 2 to 15 clouds, on average
"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 Rob Thomas, senior vice president, Cloud and Data Platform, 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."
Instana's enterprise observability platform automatically builds a deep contextual understanding of cloud applications and provides actionable insights to indicate how to best prevent and remedy IT issues that could damage the business or reduce customer satisfaction -- 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. The information could then be compared to a baseline of a normal operating application, with AI triggering alerts to resolve issues quickly before negative impacts to that transaction or activity. This can help eliminate the need for IT staff to manually monitor and manage applications, freeing these employees to focus on innovation and higher value work.
The transaction is subject to customary closing conditions. It is expected to close within several months.
For more information on today's announcement, visit www.ibm.com/cloud/blog/ibm-and-instana.