IBM Corp. today announced that it has inked a deal to acquire BoxBoat Technologies Inc., a Maryland-based consultancy focused on helping Fortune 100 companies and government agencies adopt software containers. 

IBM expects the deal to accelerate adoption of its OpenShift platform. OpenShift, which the company obtained through its $34 billion purchase of Red Hat, is an important component of its plan to increase revenue growth and profitability.  

Software containers enable developers to write applications that run more efficiently and can be easily deployed on different types of infrastructure. Consequently, adoption of the technology is soaring in the enterprise. BoxBoat provides assistance to organizations that don’t have the necessary technical know-how to deploy containers on their own. 

One of the firm’s areas of expertise is containerizing companies’ existing applications. Because containers can improve the efficiency of software, many enterprises are adopting the technology not only to build new applications but also to modernize legacy workloads.

The reason why the task is challenging, and why companies often turn to consultancies such as BoxBoat for help, is that containerizing an existing application requires major code changes. 

Legacy applications are typically based on a monolithic architecture, meaning that their subcomponents are fused together into a single piece of software. Container applications, in contrast, are typically based on a microservices architecture. Their components are not fused together but rather operate as separate modules each running in a different container. Turning a monolithic application into a microservices-oriented workload requires breaking up its components into separate modules. 

BoxBoat also helps clients with related tasks. The firm works with organizations set up  infrastructure environments, in the public cloud or elsewhere, to run their newly containerized applications. Optionally, it can take on the day-to-day maintenance of those applications to free up resources for a company’s in-house information technology teams.

For software development teams, in turn, BoxBoat offers assistance with setting up DevOps pipelines. A DevOps pipe is a collection of software tools that enables a company’s developers to build applications faster by automating time-consuming tasks.

According to IBM, BoxBoat has completed projects for a large number of Fortune 100 companies and government agencies. The firm has cloud partnerships with Amazon Web Services Inc., Microsoft Corp. and Google LLC. It will become part of the hybrid cloud practice in IBM’s Global Business Services business. 

“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, IBM’s senior vice president of hybrid cloud services. “No cloud modernization project can succeed without a containerization strategy, and BoxBoat is at the forefront of container services innovation.”

IBM plans to draw on BoxBoat’s container expertise to help it widen the adoption of OpenShift. OpenShift is the company’s software platform for building and running containerized applications in the cloud. The software is a core component of  IBM’s strategy to capture a bigger portion of what Chief Executive Officer Arvind Krishna described last year as the “$1 trillion hybrid cloud opportunity.”

BoxBoat’s container expertise will advance IBM’s OpenShift strategy because the kind of complex enterprise software projects IBM competes for with OpenShift often include consulting services. The reason is that even tech-savvy organizations sometimes need outside assistance with one technical task or another. Consequently, the more consulting services IBM can offer together with OpenShift, the easier it can make it to implement the platform and thereby lower the entry barrier for new customers.

Consulting and professional services are a significant revenue source  for IBM. Last quarter, the Global Business Services unit into which BoxBoat Technologies will be folded posted revenues of $4.2 billion. Overall, IBM estimates that the cloud professional services market is worth $200 billion annually.

BoxBoat is the third cloud-focused consultancy IBM has acquired in recent months to bolster this part of its business. Previously, it purchased Taos Inc. and Nordcloud Ltd., which had annual revenues of more than $61 million at the time of the acquisition.

IBM expects to complete the BoxBoat acquisition by the end of its current fiscal quarter. Financial terms were not disclosed.  

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