IBM Acquires Gravitant to Advance Hybrid Cloud Management

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Moving to gain access to a platform through which IT organizations can manage heterogeneous environments in the age of the cloud, IBM today announced it has acquired Gravitant.

Richard Patterson, general manager for infrastructure services for IBM Global Technology Services, says IBM will make Gravitant available as a software-as-a-service (SaaS) application, while moving to create a managed service through which IBM will manage IT environments on behalf of its customers. At the same time, IBM will continue to make an instance of Gravitant available as an appliance that can be installed locally on premise.

In effect, IBM is looking to make it simpler for IT organizations to broker multiple cloud services via a common management plane. Gravitant is designed to tap into the application programming interfaces (APIs) that various cloud services expose in a way that provides IT organizations with a single console through which they can all be managed.

Although IBM has invested billions of dollars building out its own portfolio of cloud services and applications, the acquisition of Gravitant tacitly acknowledges that cloud computing by definition is going to be heterogeneous. The challenge facing IT organizations is how to manage a hybrid cloud computing environment that will span multiple implementations of both public and private cloud computing services.

For many IT organizations, that will mean pushing the management of IT into the cloud itself. But regardless of where that management plane winds up residing, the end goal should be to find one cloud management console to rule them all.