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IBM Completes Acquisition of Apptio

IBM has completed its acquisition of Apptio Inc. after receiving all required regulatory approvals.

The acquisition brings together Apptio's FinOps offerings, including ApptioOne, Cloudability and Targetprocess, and IBM's automation portfolio of Turbonomic, AIOps and Instana to give clients a "virtual command center" for managing, optimizing and automating technology spending decisions.

With AI and foundation models top of mind for clients and partners, IBM will also augment its watsonx AI and data platform with Apptio's $450 billion in anonymized IT spend data, unlocking new innovation, insight and value.

"The combination of Apptio products and IBM's IT automation portfolio will give businesses a 360-degree technology management platform they can use to optimize and automate decisions across their IT landscapes," said Rob Thomas, Senior Vice President, Software and Chief Commercial Officer, IBM. "We are bringing together market-leading and best-in-class solutions to continue to reshape IT from a cost center to a true competitive advantage, powered by automation and AI."

Starting immediately, clients can leverage the early integration between Apptio and IBM through their Cloudability and Turbonomic offerings. This is an important first step as IBM looks to drive significant synergy across several key growth areas, including automation, Red Hat, IBM Consulting, and IBM's broader AI portfolio.

Cloudability gives organizations the data, insights and recommendations needed to understand and eliminate waste from their cloud spend, while Turbonomic generates trustworthy optimization decisions that can be automated to unlock true cloud elasticity, getting rid of overprovisioning to protect performance. Together, these products can give clients full coverage for the "Inform," "Optimize" and "Operate" stages of the FinOps Framework, providing what they need to control cloud spend without slowing innovation or negatively impacting operational performance.

Cloudability can ingest Turbonomic executed and proposed actions to provide a shared, single view across services that helps stakeholders understand the impact that has been, and can be, achieved by bringing these two leading IT automation offerings together.

The close of the Apptio acquisition is one of a series of investments in IT Automation by IBM over the last three years to help solve the problems facing today's IT and business leaders. In 2020, IBM launched its IT Automation portfolio when it announced its AIOps offerings that used AI and automation to help enterprises self-detect, diagnose and respond to IT anomalies in real time. Later that year, IBM acquired Instana, recognizing that modern applications and operations required real-time observability. Then, in 2021, IBM acquired Turbonomic which has specialized in helping clients optimize for application performance at the lowest cost with automation. Now, with the acquisition of Apptio, IBM will provide real-time data and actionable insights for leaders to make smarter spending decisions and realize value faster as they transform their operations.

IBM previously announced a definitive agreement to acquire Apptio from Vista Equity Partners on June 26, 2023.

"Our journey with Apptio is a testament to Vista's ability to create consistent outcomes that drive value for our stakeholders," said Robert F. Smith, Founder, Chairman and CEO of Vista Equity Partners. "We are proud of our continued momentum, even amidst these challenged market conditions, and look forward to seeing how Apptio's technology will bolster IBM's IT automation and AI capabilities in the years ahead. It's been an honor to partner with a visionary founder like Sunny and we wish the entire Apptio team the best in the next phase of their growth with IBM."

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IBM Completes Acquisition of Apptio

IBM has completed its acquisition of Apptio Inc. after receiving all required regulatory approvals.

The acquisition brings together Apptio's FinOps offerings, including ApptioOne, Cloudability and Targetprocess, and IBM's automation portfolio of Turbonomic, AIOps and Instana to give clients a "virtual command center" for managing, optimizing and automating technology spending decisions.

With AI and foundation models top of mind for clients and partners, IBM will also augment its watsonx AI and data platform with Apptio's $450 billion in anonymized IT spend data, unlocking new innovation, insight and value.

"The combination of Apptio products and IBM's IT automation portfolio will give businesses a 360-degree technology management platform they can use to optimize and automate decisions across their IT landscapes," said Rob Thomas, Senior Vice President, Software and Chief Commercial Officer, IBM. "We are bringing together market-leading and best-in-class solutions to continue to reshape IT from a cost center to a true competitive advantage, powered by automation and AI."

Starting immediately, clients can leverage the early integration between Apptio and IBM through their Cloudability and Turbonomic offerings. This is an important first step as IBM looks to drive significant synergy across several key growth areas, including automation, Red Hat, IBM Consulting, and IBM's broader AI portfolio.

Cloudability gives organizations the data, insights and recommendations needed to understand and eliminate waste from their cloud spend, while Turbonomic generates trustworthy optimization decisions that can be automated to unlock true cloud elasticity, getting rid of overprovisioning to protect performance. Together, these products can give clients full coverage for the "Inform," "Optimize" and "Operate" stages of the FinOps Framework, providing what they need to control cloud spend without slowing innovation or negatively impacting operational performance.

Cloudability can ingest Turbonomic executed and proposed actions to provide a shared, single view across services that helps stakeholders understand the impact that has been, and can be, achieved by bringing these two leading IT automation offerings together.

The close of the Apptio acquisition is one of a series of investments in IT Automation by IBM over the last three years to help solve the problems facing today's IT and business leaders. In 2020, IBM launched its IT Automation portfolio when it announced its AIOps offerings that used AI and automation to help enterprises self-detect, diagnose and respond to IT anomalies in real time. Later that year, IBM acquired Instana, recognizing that modern applications and operations required real-time observability. Then, in 2021, IBM acquired Turbonomic which has specialized in helping clients optimize for application performance at the lowest cost with automation. Now, with the acquisition of Apptio, IBM will provide real-time data and actionable insights for leaders to make smarter spending decisions and realize value faster as they transform their operations.

IBM previously announced a definitive agreement to acquire Apptio from Vista Equity Partners on June 26, 2023.

"Our journey with Apptio is a testament to Vista's ability to create consistent outcomes that drive value for our stakeholders," said Robert F. Smith, Founder, Chairman and CEO of Vista Equity Partners. "We are proud of our continued momentum, even amidst these challenged market conditions, and look forward to seeing how Apptio's technology will bolster IBM's IT automation and AI capabilities in the years ahead. It's been an honor to partner with a visionary founder like Sunny and we wish the entire Apptio team the best in the next phase of their growth with IBM."

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I've spent a lot of time in the channel, and one thing I keep coming back to is this: a partner program is only as good as what it looks like in the field. Many programs look great on paper, but when a partner is in front of a customer navigating a complex hybrid environment or trying to make the case for AI-powered observability, the gap between what a vendor promises and what it actually delivers becomes very clear, very fast ...

Enterprises today operate in a real-time environment where uninterrupted access to trusted data has become a baseline expectation for users, applications and automated systems. Traditional DataOps models, built on manual effort and human triage, cannot keep pace with this always active demand. AI agents are emerging as the operational backbone, ensuring consistent data availability, reinforcing trustworthiness and enabling a level of scale that manual processes cannot achieve ...

For decades, trust in the digital workplace rested on familiar signals. We trusted faces on video calls, voices on the phone, and emails that appeared to come from people we knew. These cues felt human and intuitive. They anchored how decisions were made, approvals were granted, and access was authorized. AI-powered deepfakes have quietly broken that model ...

Cloud migration was supposed to be a one-way door. For most enterprises, it turns out it isn't. Cloud data repatriation is a real and growing trend. A new survey ... finds that 89% of organizations plan to expand their on-premises infrastructure footprint over the next two years — and 75% have already moved at least some workloads back from public cloud in the past 24 months. The findings point to a broad rethinking of where data belongs ...

Over the past few years, large language models (LLMs) have revolutionized the software industry. Given their ability to excel at multi-step reasoning, LLMs have helped enterprises streamline workflows and adapt to the unknown. However, employing such models comes with sky-high costs, latency issues, and limited flexibility. In the realm of IT operations, it is generally wiser to employ smaller, domain-specific models instead ...

For years, DevOps teams operated under a simple assumption: collect enough telemetry, and you can find and fix any problem. That assumption is breaking down. Modern enterprises now operate across microservices, hybrid cloud environments, APIs, Kubernetes, and highly automated delivery pipelines. Releases happen continuously, dependencies shift constantly, and failures spread faster than teams can diagnose them ...

New Relic surveyed IT and engineering leaders from the media and entertainment (M&E) sector to understand what's working — and where challenges persist with their observability practices. The findings reveal how M&E organizations are navigating rising platform complexity, audience expectations, and AI-driven change. Below are five takeaways that stand out ...

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In MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Episode 24, Shamus McGillicuddy, VP of Research, Network Infrastructure and Operations, at EMA discusses network observability tool sprawl ... 

In cloud-native systems, scaling is often as simple as moving a slider. For on-premise databases, the stakes are different. Over-provisioning hardware is expensive. Under-provisioning leads to performance bottlenecks that are difficult to fix once the equipment is in the rack ...