IBM Reveals its Plans to Acquire Boxboat-A DevOps And Kubernetes Startup

IBM unveils plans to buy its 11th company over the past 12 months. Now, it is the DevOps and Kubernetes startup, BoxBoat. The news surfaced within weeks after IBM acquired the application and network performance management star Turbonomic.

In 2021, IBM has already spent millions acquiring Salesforce expert 7Summits and Waeg; hybrid cloud consulting firm Taos; myInvenio for AI automation; StackRox for container and Kubernetes security.

Since July 2020, IBM has also acquired hybrid cloud consultant Nordcloud, SAP specialist TruQua Enterprises, WDG for AI automation, and AIOps expert Instana. But, perhaps, its biggest IT acquisition was Red Hat for $34 billion in 2019.

Most of IBM’s acquisitions over the past year, such as its buys of Nordcloud, Taos, StackRox, and BoxBoat, are focused around its prominently expanding multi-cloud transformation, management expertise, and hybrid cloud capabilities. BoxBoat’s acquisition, which happened just one week since Jim Whitehurst’s sudden exit as president of IBM, is to boost Red Hat OpenShift adoption and Big Blue’s hybrid cloud strategy.

John Granger, senior vice president of IBM’s hybrid cloud services, stated, “None of the cloud modernization projects can thrive without a containerization strategy. BoxBoat is at the forefront of container services innovation.” He further added, “Our clients need a cloud architecture that has competencies to operate across a traditional IT environment, private cloud, and public clouds. That is at the core of our hybrid cloud strategy.”

BoxBoat was established in 2016, aiming to assist customers in complex cloud consulting projects by implementing Kubernetes and containers to enable hybrid cloud environments. BoxBoat is also a partner to Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud, advising several fortune 100 companies and government agencies on best practices, reforming existing DevOps solutions, and containerizing critical workloads. Though, the financial terms of the BoxBoat deal are not disclosed yet but, the deal is expected to be closed by this quarter.

According to the forecast by IT research firm Gartner, more than 85 percent of global companies will be running containerized applications in production by 2025. Kubernetes is open-source cloud-enabled software for managing and deploying containers. As a result, it is quickly becoming the preferred means to build digital services at scale and across clouds.

Tim Hohman, CEO-BoxBeat, says, “We establish BoxBoat on the idea that the containers and DevOps would become an industry standard. It has the potential to transform enterprise IT with high-speed application deployment workflows.” Furthermore, he added, “Joining IBM will allow us to comprehend a shared vision of assisting our customers modernize by effectively deploying container-based applications on-premises and to the cloud.”

BoxBoat delivers a complete services suite, which includes tailored strategies for Kubernetes. Further, it also assists in adopting an enterprise container platform and application, DevSecOps, training, and enablement. IBM stated BoxBoat helps enterprises with the proper tooling, business strategy, workflows, and processes to meet their DevOps goals.

BoxBoat is joining IBM Global Business Services to grow the hybrid cloud services business quickly. The startup is looking forwards to enhance IBM’s capacity to meet demand surge for containers and the processing elements of the digital cloud transformation. BoxBoat engineers are active open-source contributors and expert admins and application developers in Kubernetes, AWS, Docker, GitLab, Google Cloud Platform, Hashicorp, and Microsoft Azure technologies.