Financial terms of the deal, expected to close later this year following regulatory clearance, were not disclosed.
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John Morris, president of Cleversafe, added that the acquisition will allow the firm to pursue the “opportunities that lie ahead” following integration with Big Blue’s cloud portfolio, including reaching customers with varied cloud and storage workloads. “Cleversafe will… [help] clients overcome these challenges by extending and strengthening our cloud storage strategy, as well as our portfolio”.
IBM is buying object storage startup Cleversafe for an undisclosed amount of cash or shares.
Regarding the Cleversafe acquisition, IBM released a statement saying, “The company uses unique algorithms to slice data into pieces and reassemble the information from a single copy, rather than simply making multiple copies of the data, which is how storage traditionally has been done”.
In the data storage and data management market, Cleversafe claims that it owns more than 350 patents related to this breakthrough technology.
A more substantial purchase came in August, when IBM acquired Merge Healthcare for $1 billionin an effort to give its Watson cognitive computing system the ability to see medical images.
Cleversafe’s Dispersed Storage Network (dsNet) solutions enhance on-premise storage options for clients and service providers with low-priced, large scale active archives and unstructured data content stores.
IBM said the deal underscores its continued commitment to data storage across flash, software-defined and cloud. That means Cleversafe can store data significantly cheaper and more securely, IBM said. Since not all processes can be handled in the cloud, IBM is hoping to develop a customer base that’s attracted to a hybrid approach with a few systems on premise and a few in the cloud.
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It will also improve public cloud capabilities offered under the SoftLayer brand and add new storage options to IBM’s Platform-as-a-Service for application developers called Bluemix. This interoperability should make SoftLayer that much more attractive than its rival for customers interested in implementing that kind of hybrid operating model, but IBM still has an uphill battle to fight in the infrastructure-as-a-service space.
