IBM acquires Blue Box

Almost at the same time when Cisco announced the acquisition of Piston Cloud Computing, another big name announced to have acquired another OpenStack-powered company: Blue Box.

Seattle based Blue Box is a privately-held company founded 2003, specialized in Private Cloud as a Service (PCaaS) offering its Blue Box Cloud as a remote-managed private cloud solution is managed on dedicated hardware, powered by OpenStack.

Big Blue, officially, acquired Blue Box to expand and strengthen its cloud computing services but ironically this makes harder to figure out IBM’s overall strategy on OpenStack.

What is definitely clear is that OpenStack is where everyone wants to be, in few months Cisco bought Metacloud and Piston Cloud, and IBM is joining other large companies on this “shopping trend”.

According to Gartner 72% of enterprises will be pursuing a hybrid cloud strategy this year, and it is becoming more and more crucial for companies to leverage multiple models while maintaining consistent management across their cloud platforms.

This acquisition will likely allow IBM to deliver a public cloud-like experience within the customer’s own data center, relieving organizations of the concern of traditional private cloud deployments.

Financial details were not disclosed.

Blue Box can enhance and complement developer productivity by:

  • Speeding delivery of applications and data through simplified and consistent access to public, dedicated and local cloud infrastructures
  • Supporting managed infrastructure services across hybrid cloud environments and IBM’s digital innovation platform, Bluemix
  • Offering a single management tool for OpenStack-based private clouds regardless of location

Blue Box’s founder and CTO Jesse Proudman writes on its company’s blog about the acquisition:

IBM is in the midst of a massive transformation, placing the weight of its 400,000+ exceptional employees behind four strategic imperatives: Commerce, Analytics, Security and Cloud. For IBM, acquiring Blue Box is a way to turbo-charge their cloud strategy: Our technology and business model will become a formational kernel for the IBM Cloud organization to rally around for private cloud. Add SoftLayer’s global footprint and IBM’s OpenStack upstream capabilities, and I can’t think of an organization better suited to tackle this challenge.