IBM (NYSE: IBM) today announced plans to acquire BoxBoat Technologies, a premier DevOps consultancy and enterprise Kubernetes certified service provider. BoxBoat will extend IBM’s container strategy and implementation services portfolio to further advance IBM’s hybrid cloud strategy and accelerate Red Hat OpenShift adoption globally.
“Our clients require a cloud architecture that allows them to operate across a traditional IT environment, private cloud and public clouds. That’s at the heart of our hybrid cloud approach,” said John Granger, Senior Vice President, Hybrid Cloud Services at IBM. “No cloud modernization project can succeed without a containerization strategy, and BoxBoat is at the forefront of container services innovation.”
Founded in 2016 and headquartered in Bethesda, Maryland, BoxBoat helps clients establish containers and Kubernetes as core enablers for cloud solutions. Its track record of delivering complex cloud consulting projects includes advising many Fortune 100 and government clients on industry best practices, modernizing existing DevOps solutions, and containerizing mission critical workloads.
Reflecting IBM’s strong commitment to clients’ successful journey to cloud, BoxBoat builds on IBM’s ongoing investment in hybrid cloud services and driving growth within the $200 billion cloud professional services market.1 This news follows IBM’s acquisition of leading cloud services firms – Nordcloud and Taos – which closed in the first quarter of 2021 and significantly expanded IBM’s multicloud transformation, management expertise and capabilities.
Kubernetes and Containers Are Leading Drivers of Digital Transformation
Containers and Kubernetes are two of the leading drivers of enterprise digital transformation. Software application containerization makes life easier for developers by further abstracting computing infrastructure, and adoption of enterprise container platforms is on the rise. By 2025, more than 85 percent of global organizations will be running containerized applications in production, which is a significant increase from fewer than 35 percent in 2019.2 At the same time, Kubernetes — open source software for deploying and managing those containers — is rapidly becoming the preferred way to build digital services at scale and across clouds. The StackRox “State of Container and Kubernetes Security” Fall 2020 report found that 91 percent of organizations are leveraging Kubernetes to orchestrate containers, and 75 percent of organizations are actively using Kubernetes in production.
BoxBoat will join IBM Global Business Services’ fast-growing Hybrid Cloud Services business, enhancing IBM’s capacity to meet rising client demand for container strategy and the critical people and process components of the cloud transformation journey. BoxBoat delivers a full suite of services that include customized strategies for Kubernetes and Enterprise Container Platform adoption, application containerization, DevSecOps, training and enablement. BoxBoat guides enterprises on the right tooling, business strategy, workflows and processes to meet their DevOps goals.
“We founded BoxBoat on the idea that containers and DevOps would become an industry standard with the potential to transform enterprise IT with lightning fast application deployment workflows,” said Tim Hohman, CEO and Co-Founder of BoxBoat. “Joining IBM will allow us to realize a shared vision of helping clients innovate by successfully deploying container-based applications on-premise and to the cloud.”
BoxBoat’s team is comprised of highly skilled engineers with an average of nine years of industry experience, active open source contributors, Kubernetes Admins, Kubernetes Application Developers, and automation experts. Their highly skilled workforce holds extensive cloud ecosystem certifications in Amazon Web Services, Docker, GitLab, Google Cloud Platform, Hashicorp, Kubernetes, and Microsoft Azure technologies.
The company also holds partnerships with Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform. BoxBoat was also the first GitLab Certified Professional Services Partner.
The transaction is subject to customary closing conditions. It is expected to close this quarter.
