Says Blue Box strengthens IBM Cloud leadership position in private and hybrid clouds
IBM has acquired Blue Box Group, Inc., a managed private cloud provider built on OpenStack.
Blue Box is a privately held company based in Seattle that provides businesses with a simple, private cloud as a service platform, based on OpenStack. Customers benefit from the ability to more easily deploy workloads across hybrid cloud environments. Financial details were not disclosed.
Through Blue Box, IBM will help businesses rapidly integrate their cloud-based applications and on-premises systems into OpenStack-based managed cloud. Blue Box also strengthens IBM Cloud’s existing OpenStack portfolio, with the introduction of a remotely managed OpenStack offering to provide clients with a local cloud and increased visibility, control and security.
This move further accelerates IBM’s commitment to open technologies and OpenStack. IBM has 500 developers dedicated to working on open cloud projects to bring new cloud innovations to market. With Forrester Research recently finding that more than twice as many firms use or plan to use IBM Cloud as their primary hosted private cloud platform than the next closest vendor, Blue Box is a strategic fit into the IBM Cloud portfolio.
This acquisition will enable IBM to deliver a public cloud-like experience within the client’s own data center, relieving organizations of the burden of traditional private cloud deployments announced the press release.
“IBM is dedicated to helping our clients migrate to the cloud in an open, secure, data rich environment that meet their current and future business needs,” said IBM General Manager of Cloud Services Jim Comfort. “The acquisition of Blue Box accelerates IBM’s open cloud strategy making it easier for our clients to move to data and applications across clouds and adopt hybrid cloud environments.”
“No brand is more respected in IT than IBM,” said Blue Box Founder and CTO Jesse Proudman. “This acquisition signals the beginning of new OpenStack options delivered by IBM. Now is the time to arm customers with more efficient development, delivery and lower cost solutions than they’ve seen thus far in the market.”
