IBM Buys OpenStack Private Cloud Provider Blue Box

IBM has snapped up an OpenStack provider Blue Box for an undisclosed sum.

The Seattle-based company was founded in 2003 as a hosting company, but recently upped its game into cloud. The company has posted impressive figures of late. In 2013, Blue Box claimed to have seen a three-year revenue growth of 399 percent.

Open cloud strategy

“The acquisition of Blue Box accelerates IBM’s open cloud strategy,” said Jim Comfort, IBM’s general manager of cloud services. “Making it easier for our clients to move to data and applications across clouds and adopt hybrid cloud environments.”

“Today, I’m elated to announce the acquisition of Blue Box by IBM,” said Jesse Proudman, founder and CTO of Blue Box. “Our technology and business model will become a formational kernel for the IBM Cloud organisation to rally around for private cloud. Add SoftLayer’s global footprint and IBM’s OpenStack upstream capabilities, and I can’t think of an organisation better suited to tackle this challenge.”

Last month, IBM upped its OpenStack momentum by making it easier for its customers to use the platform alongside IBM’s own hybrid cloud.

The firm has released a suite of tools called OpenStack Services, which effectively help customers build, launch and integrate apps in their own private cloud and in IBM’s SoftLayer hybrid cloud, with interoperability and job-moving simplified.

IBM will manage both the OpenStack environment and the infrastructure side, hosted in IBM’s global cloud data centres. The firm said it has more than 500 developers allocated its OpenStack projects.

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