IBM has announced that it will be acquiring monitoring company Instana. The company explained the acquisition will help bolster its hybrid cloud and AI strategy. 

According to IBM, it will now be able to better help companies manage the challenges and complexities of managing application performance across teams and clouds. 

“With the added responsibility of ensuring the build and run quality of the software they develop, DevOps teams need a new generation of application performance monitoring and observability capabilities to succeed,” said Mirko Novakovic, co-founder and CEO, Instana. “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.”

Once Instana’s capabilities are integrated into IBM, companies will be able to feed monitoring insights into Watson AIOps, and the resulting information could be compared to an application’s normal operation baseline, with AI triggering alerts to quickly resolve issues. According to IBM, this will help eliminate the need for IT teams to manually monitor and manage applications, allowing them to spend more of their time on innovation and higher value work. 

Other steps IBM took to bolster its AI strategy recently include the launch of IBM Watson AIOps, the acquisition of WDG Automation, an expanded partnership with ServiceNow, and continued updates to IBM Cloud Pak for Automation.

“Our clients today are faced with managing a complex technology landscape filled with mission-critical applications and data that are running across a variety of hybrid cloud environments – from public clouds, private clouds and on-premises,” said Rob Thomas, senior vice president of cloud and data platform at IBM. “IBM’s acquisition of Instana is yet another important step that we are taking to provide companies with the most complete portfolio of AI-automated solutions to tackle this enormous challenge and help prevent unforeseen IT incidents that can cost a business in lost revenue and reputation.”