IBM’s Latest Cloud Deal is Salesforce Partner
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Another week, another IBM acquisition: This time, a cloud consulting and implementation services specialist called Bluewolf Group.
IBM (NYSE: IBM) said Thursday (March 31) the acquisition would help extend its analytics, cloud consulting and "experience design" capabilities. Bluewolf is a top Salesforce.com (NYSE: CRM) partner.
Financial details of the acquisition were not disclosed, but reports pegged the deal at about $200 million. Upon completion of the transaction, which is expected by the end of the second quarter of this year, IBM said Bluewolf would become part of its Interactive Experience unit focusing on offering consulting services for clients adopting Salesforce offerings via the cloud.
The deal is intended to boost the IBM unit's customer experience and data integration platforms while adding a cloud consulting capability. That, IBM asserted, would help position it to address enterprise clients that constitute an estimated $111 billion market for Salesforce professional services.
New York-based Bluewolf is a long-time consulting partner to Salesforce with about 500 employees in the U.S., Europe and Australia. Among its clients are Stanley Black & Decker (NYSE: SWK) and Vodafone Hutchinson Australia (ASX:HTA).
IBM stressed the deal would allow it to use an expanding cloud services portfolio to address "the consumer-grade experience." Added Bridget van Kralingen, senior vice president of IBM Global Business Services: "With Bluewolf, we add expertise to scale that capability to the cloud-based capabilities of Salesforce.”
IBM added that Bluewolf would continue its focus on developing Salesforce service implementations, extending its current focus on financial services, healthcare, manufacturing, education and new media.
The Bluewolf acquisition is IBM's tenth cloud deal since the beginning of 2015 as it seeks to extend its reach in the burgeoning hybrid cloud market that according to some estimates is worth $100 billion. Those acquisitions range from cloud video (Ustream, Clearleap) and data (Strongloop, Compose) services to open hybrid clouds (BlueBox) and cognitive APIs for deep learning (AlchemyAPI).
IBM also made a splash with the acquisition of The Weather Company and Cleversafe as it bolstered its hybrid cloud storage offerings. Cleversafe is an object-based storage software and appliance developer. IBM has also invested in medical imaging (Merge Healthcare) and cloud-based human resources and financial services (Meteorix).
The Weather Company and Merge Healthcare deals give IBM a stronger foothold in the big data market.
Those acquisitions were preceded by related deals aimed at, among other things, moving large files via broadband networks. In 2014, for example, IBM acquired Aspera Inc., a developer of technology used to speed large data transfers over broadband networks. During the SC15 conference, Aspera showcased wide-area network file transfer speeds of up to 100 Gb/s, auto-scaling for clustered transfers for the cloud and HPC along with a data ingest capability targeting HPC analytics.
