IBM’s recent acquisition of Turbonomic Inc. was testimony that today’s multicloud and hybrid IT environments demand AI-driven application management tools to manage these increasingly complex infrastructures. But there is another dimension to this story: IBM is moving boldly into the container-native storage lane, and the Turbonomic purchase will help navigate.

In the continued evolution of IBM’s portfolio following its purchase of Red Hat Inc. in 2018, the company recently announced new and updated storage solutions, including Spectrum Fusion, provider of container-native, software-defined storage. The hyperconverged infrastructure system will include Red Hat OpenShift to support containers and virtual machines.

Turbonomic’s monitoring capabilities for containers, along with its automation solutions for application resource management, will provide another set of options for IBM’s expanding product line in the operations management space.

“To support the building of momentum, you need IT operations management capabilities. It puts that momentum on fire. It fuels that adoption of containers,” said Naveen Chhabra, senior analyst with Forrester Research, speaking with SiliconANGLE about the Turbonomic acquisition.

From May 11 through May 13, Turbonomic will host “Apps ON Cloud Summit,” a free, three-day virtual event for IT leaders, cloud visionaries, network aficionados and DevOps pros. The summit will feature cutting-edge thought leadership and hands-on practical learning from some of the foremost thinkers and practitioners in cloud, containers and network. Opportunities for digital engagement will bring participants closer to the speaker community and allow them to interact with a wide variety of people across the technology spectrum.

The speaker list includes Ben Nye, chief executive officer of Turbonomic; Corey Quinn, chief cloud economist at the Duckbill Group; Jo Peterson, vice president of Clarify360; Tim Crawford, CIO strategic advisor at AVOA; Kelsey Hightower, staff developer advocate of Google Cloud Platform; Mor Cohen-Tal, CTO of cloud at Turbonomic; and Jerry Cuomo, IBM fellow, VP and CTO of IBM Automation at IBM Corp. (* Disclosure below.)

Managing complexity

Turbonomic’s own recent surveys add context to the complexity confronting DevOps and IT operations teams in the enterprise. In its “State of the Multicloud” survey of over 800 IT professionals, Turbonomic found that while 56% were using at least one container platform, challenges surrounding scaling containers in production had become a major hindrance for advanced use cases.

The survey also noted that of the more than half of respondents using containers, 76% of them were using Kubernetes. Turbonomic has built key functionalities for automated management of the Kubernetes container orchestration platform, which include monitoring of application service-level objectives and scaling container limits up or down based on demand.

“There is no doubt that containers are a strategic investment for customers today,” said Asena Hertz, director of product marketing at Turbonomic, as part of the survey’s release. “Anyone building or re-architecting their applications to digitally transform is doing so with containers. Our survey finds that this complexity is getting in the way of organizations operating at scale.”

AIOps momentum

IBM’s acquisition of Turbonomic will also bolster its AIOps stack automation offerings, an area in which IBM has been especially focused in recent months.

Prior to the purchase of Turbonomic, IBM acquired Instana, an application performance monitoring provider, and the Robotic Process Automation software vendor myInvenio. IBM has indicated it plans to integrate Turbonomic with Instana and its Cloud Pak for Watson AIOps.

IBM’s recent activity provides further confirmation that reality has set in when it comes to the role of AI as a mainstream element in IT operations. Enterprise customers want it, and IT services vendors are retooling portfolios to meet that need.

“AI-powered automation has become inevitable, helping to make all information-centric jobs more productive,” said Dinesh Nirmal, general manager of IBM’s automation business, in a recent interview. “That’s why IBM continues to invest in providing our customers with a one-stop-shop of AI-powered automation capabilities that spans business processes and IT. The addition of Turbonomic now takes our portfolio another major step forward by ensuring customers will have full visibility into what is going on throughout their hybrid cloud infrastructure, and across their entire enterprise.”

Livestream of Apps ON Cloud Summit

The Apps ON Cloud Summit is a livestream event. You can register for free here to access the live event. Plus, you can watch interviews here on demand after the live event.

Featured speakers

See the complete list of featured speakers for the Apps ON Cloud Summit here.

(* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for Apps ON Cloud Summit. Neither Turbonomic Inc., the sponsor for the event, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: Turbonomic