IBM has entered a definitive agreement to acquire Instana, an application performance monitoring and observability company. The acquisition will help businesses better manage the complexity of modern applications that span the hybrid cloud landscape. This deal will further enhance IBM’s Hybrid Cloud and AI strategy and strengthen its AI-powered automation capabilities. However, the financial details of the deal still remains under cover and the transaction is subject to customary closing conditions and is expected to close within several months.

The acquisition will further empower IBM to help companies overcome the challenge of managing application performance across multiple teams, and across two to 15 clouds, on an average. IBM is constantly building on its AI-powered automation capabilities with the launch of IBM Watson AIOps earlier this year, its acquisition of WDG Automation, expanded partnership with ServiceNow, and continued updated 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, Cloud and Data Platform, 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.”

Instana is a Chicago based company with a development center in Germany. The company provides businesses with capabilities to manage the performance of complex and modern cloud-native applications on mobile devices, public and private clouds, and on-premises. Once Instana’s capabilities are integrated into IBM, the companies will be able to feed these insights into Watson AIOps, which will help eliminate the need for IT staff to manually monitor and manage applications, freeing the employees to focus on innovation and higher value work.

“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.”