IBM is betting on a growing demand for hybrid clouds in the enterprise with its acquisition of Blue Box Group, which specializes in offering OpenStack open-source cloud hosting services.

According to IBM, the marriage will help the company to speed up private cloud deployments and simplify the management of OpenStack clouds.

Blue Box will be incorporated with IBM’s Bluemix, a solution designed to build, manage and run clouds using an implementation of its Cloud Foundry platform-as-a-Service (PaaS). According to IBM, the acquisition underlines its commitment to open-source and especially OpenStack. Financial terms of the deal were not revealed.

Coincidentally, the deal was the second major OpenStack buy of the day, coming just hours after its big rival Cisco Systems Ltd. gobbled up Piston Cloud Computing, Inc. in a move that indicates a period of unprecedented consolidation for the OpenStack project.

But unlike Piston Cloud (a deal that was widely expected), IBM’s acquisition of Blue Box is much more of a surprise, for the company had plenty of customers and was very profitable, according to Jesse Proudman, Founder and CTO at Blue Box Group, in an appearance on theCUBE last September at OpenStackSV 2014.

Blue Box’s major innovation is to give organizations an easy alternative to setting up and deploying their own OpenStack clouds internally. Instead, Blue Box offers OpenStack as a service, allowing organizations to control workloads from a single console, whether those workloads run on internal infrastructure or Blue Box’s private cloud.

The buy fits in with IBM’s strategy of providing multi-pronged cloud services, with an emphasis on a mix of on-premises and public or hybrid cloud services. It currently offers IBM SoftLayer services like infrastructure-as-a-service, Bluemix as a platform-as-a-service for cloud-oriented developers, and remote, dedicated server workloads through its SoftLayer bare-metal offerings.

The acquisition means IBM will be able to help developers building cloud-oriented applications. It will allow the company to “simplified and consistent access to public, dedicated and local cloud infrastructure,” IBM said in a statement.

“This is an expansion of IBM’s cloud mission which includes OpenStack,” said Wikibon analyst Stu Miniman. “IBM is looking to build a story of leadership in the space and this is a tactical move to accelerate the adoption of IBM cloud.”

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