IBM Will Acquire Instana to Advance its Hybrid Cloud and AI Strategy

IBM announced a definitive agreement to acquire Instana, an application performance monitoring and observability company. The acquisition will help businesses better manage the complexity of modern applications that span the hybrid cloud landscape. Today's news 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," said Rob Thomas, Senior Vice President, Cloud and Data Platform, IBM. "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.

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. 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.

"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, Instana. "Our 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.