IBM acquires container services provider BoxBoat

IBM today announced that it has acquired BoxBoat Technologies, a Bethesda, Maryland-based DevOps consultancy and enterprise Kubernetes service provider. The move, which comes the same week former Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst stepped down as president at IBM, will extend IBM’s container and data portfolio to advance the company’s hybrid cloud practice, IBM SVP John Granger said in a statement.

“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,” Granger said. “No cloud modernization project can succeed without a containerization strategy, and BoxBoat is at the forefront of container services innovation.”

Founded in 2016, BoxBoat helps clients establish containers and Kubernetes — an orchestration system for app deployment — as enablers for hybrid cloud solutions. The startup delivers services including strategies for Kubernetes and enterprise container adoption, as well as app containerization, DevSecOps, training, enablement, and guides on DevOps tooling and workflows.

BoxBoat’s customers span the Fortune 100 and government agencies, and the company counts among its partners Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform. It also has the distinction of being the first certified professional services partner with GitLab, according to BoxBoat CEO Tim Hohman.

Hohman says that BoxBoat will join IBM Global Business Services’ (GBS) Hybrid Cloud Services division. The transaction is expected to close this fiscal quarter, subject to customary closing conditions.

“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,” Hohman said in a press release. “Joining IBM will allow us to realize a shared vision of helping clients innovate by successfully deploying container-based applications on-premises and to the cloud.”

Containers and Kubernetes are two of the leading drivers of enterprise digital transformation. By 2025, it’s anticipated that more than 85% of global organizations will be running containerized apps in production, a significant increase from fewer than 35% in 2019.  At the same time, Kubernetes is becoming the preferred way to build digital services. StackRox found that 91% of organizations are leveraging Kubernetes to orchestrate containers, while 75%  of organizations are actively using Kubernetes in production.

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