IBM Corp. today said that it’s acquiring Bluetab Solutions Group SL, a Madrid-based provider of software and consulting services focused on helping enterprises move on-premises data management systems to the cloud.

Bluetab has about 700 employees who will become part of the technology giant’s data services consulting practice following the deal. It’s one of more than a half-dozen companies IBM has acquired since the start of the year to extend its solutions portfolio.

Bluetab provides a software product called Fastcapture that uses machine learning algorithms to do automatic organization of business documents such as invoices and forms by category. It can also extract information from those documents. For example, a company use Fastcapture to scan receipts and automatically extract the value of each transaction.

Organizing information from documents into a standardized form makes it easier to load the information into a company’s applications. In the process, Bluetab says, Fastcapture can free up time for a company’s employees by automating repetitive data entry tasks.

Alongside software, Bluetab provides consulting services to help companies move on-premises analytics systems to the cloud. The company can set up an analytics environment for an enterprise in its public cloud of choice and, if needed, manage the environment on behalf of the organization. Bluetab also takes on smaller projects such as building data transfer workflows for sharing information between different systems.

“The outside-in digital transformation of the past is giving way to the inside-out potential of using company-owned data with AI and automation to generate business value and create intelligent workflows,” said Mark Foster, the senior vice president of IBM’s Services and Global Business Services business. “Our acquisition of Bluetab will fuel migration to the cloud and help our clients to realize even more value from their mission-critical data.”

IBM has acquired more than a half-dozen companies since the beginning of the year to expand its software and consulting businesses. 

On the software side, IBM in April inked a deal reportedly worth more than $1.5 billion to buy Turbonomic Inc., the provider of an artificial intelligence platform for optimizing cloud applications. The platform can increase the performance of companies’ off-premises workloads and reduce the amount of infrastructure they use. Earlier, IBM acquired a firm called myInvenio Srl whose software helps identify business processes that a company could make more efficient by applying robotic process automation.

Consulting services play an important role in IBM’s revenue growth strategy as well. Enterprises often need technical assistance implementing new software, which means IBM has an opportunity to bundle professional services into many of its software deals. To expand this part of its business, the company bought a string of consultancies in recent months, most recently application containerization specialist BoxBoat Technologies Inc. last week.

Bluetab, with its mix of software products and professional services offerings, advances IBM’s growth strategy in both the software and consulting markets. It could indirectly also give IBM boost in the AI segment. IBM Chief Executive Officer Arvind Krishna late last year named AI, along with the hybrid cloud, as key focuses in the company’s efforts to boost revenue growth.

AI projects heavily rely on the kind of data management infrastructure that Bluetab specializes in building and optimizing. Developing an AI application requires software engineers to train a neural network on a large amount of training data. This data, like the other information in a company, must be organized and monitored for errors. The same is true for the records that a machine learning model processes once it’s running in production.

IBM’s Cloud & Cognitive Software unit, which includes many of its cloud and AI products, generated revenue of $5.4 billion last quarter. Its Global Business Services consulting business, meanwhile, increased revenues by 2.4% to $4.2 billion.

IBM didn’t disclose the financial terms of the Bluetab acquisition. It expects the deal to close in the third quarter. 

Image: Patrick/Flickr