UPDATED 23:09 EDT / MARCH 30 2016

NEWS

IBM acquires Salesforce consulting firm Bluewolf for $200m

International Business Machines Corp. has acquired Salesforce consulting firm Bluewolf Consulting LLC.

Terms of the deal were not officially disclosed but the price is reported by Re/Code to be $200 million.

Founded in 2000 and providing services to Salesforce since 2002, Bluewolf claims that their technology-driven method combines their team’s years of experience with cloud solutions that continually connect their clients with their customers.

While specializing in Salesforce the company does provide support for other cloud solutions, and claims to have worked with over 9,500 clients from its offices in several countries.

Post acquisition Bluewolf will join IBM Interactive Experience, Big Blue’s global services arm that provides support to customers who use platforms including Salesforce, SAP and others.

IBM Interactive Experience Global Leader Paul Papas told The Wall Street Journal that Bluewolf customers will benefit from other IBM services and activities, including mobile application development with Apple, Inc.

Growing business

The acquisition of Bluewolf by IBM is another in a long list for the company as it continues to build out its consulting and online services business.

IBM acquired a string of creative agencies in late January (Exc.io, Aperto AG and Resource/Ammirati Inc.) along with video streaming service Ustream, The Weather Company and others, as it transforms itself from a computing hardware company to one with a focus on business software and services delivered via the cloud, with support for artificial intelligent computing power provided by IBM’s Watson platform.

As The Weather Company’s Chief Information & Technology Officer Bryson Koehler explained to SiliconANGLE’s theCUBE team in February:

“Watson can only be as smart as the data you feed it…The capability to ingest, transform, store, do analytics on, provide alerting on, and then distribute data — that’s what we do,”

While it’s not clear what sort of data Bluewolf will add to the mix, the computing power provided by Watson will certainly provide a complimentary feature to clients who are looking at new ways of analyzing their own data and maximizing their outcomes on Salesforce and other cloud platforms.

The deal is expected to close in the second quarter of 2016 and is subject to standard regulatory reviews.

Image credit: daijihirata/Flickr/CC by 2.0

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