On November 18, 2020, IBM announced its future path of acquiring the APM startup Instana for an undisclosed value, and it came as part of IBM’s effort for advancing its Hybrid Cloud and AI strategy. It is announced only after a few weeks when the company decided to shift its focus to its hybrid cloud and AI platform, and also planned to separate its infrastructure service unit from the Global Technology Services division, changing it as a new company.

Instana, the German-American application performance management (APM), founded in 2015 by Pete Abrams, Mirko, Novakovic, Fabian Lange, Pavlo Baron, will be helped by the acquisition by IBM, for providing better monitoring and management capabilities to the Hybrid Cloud technology.

A press release by IBM said, “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.”

In the month of July, IBM acquired Red Hat for $34 billion, and the acquisition was central to IBM’s Hybrid Cloud computing technology, and now Instana will catalyze the existing system with the advanced monitoring technology.

Mirko Novakovic, Cofounder & CEO, Instana, said, “Instana’s 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.”

As the complexity of the cloud computing services increases, ease of use and management become a luxury, where IBM’s Hybrid Cloud platform provides the customers with a one-stop portal for accessing, creating and deploying software on multiple cloud services, which can combine private and public cloud services. The Hybrid Cloud platform makes communication possible between different cloud services and grants users to manage and monitor those from a single place.

IBM (International Business Machines Corporation), founded in 1911, is greatly contributing towards innovations in technology and managed to remain relevant. With shifting goals over the years, in hardware and software services, relevant to cloud-computing services and AI, these technologies are at the central focus.

IBM’s Instana acquisition is expected to expand and improve its cloud computing services. IBM said that with this acquisition, it will help companies in overcoming the challenge of managing application performance, across multiple teams, with 2 to 15 clouds on average. This showcases the AI-powered automation capabilities IBM holds.