IBM’s gobbling up AI companies left and right — and we love it

Big Blue’s been on a buying spree lately with Databand.ai, a big data startup, becoming its latest acquisition. Don’t blink. If you do, you might miss another huge IBM buyout.

Up front: Big data is a big deal. Less than a decade ago, many businesses were manually entering data into spreadsheets to meet their insight needs. Today, even the most modest startups can benefit from deep analytics.

Unfortunately, the landscape of companies that provide targeted services for a spectrum of industries is somewhat barren.

Simply put, you can’t just integrate a bunch of generic AI models into your IT stack and hope to magically pipeline solutions to your company’s problems.

It takes infrastructure and expertise to turn your hoard of data into action points.

Background: IBM’s spent over a century developing the infrastructure. But expertise is a moving target. To keep up with the modern influx of deep learning and data solutions in a period of technological turbulence, the company’s new CEO has opened up the corporate wallet in hopes of building a data-parsing juggernaut.

Per a recent IBM blog post:

Databand.ai is IBM’s fifth acquisition in 2022 as the company continues to bolster its hybrid cloud and AI skills and capabilities. IBM has acquired more than 25 companies since Arvind Krishna became CEO in April 2020.

This particular acquisition shores up IBM’s ability to provide “data observability” solutions for its clients and customers.

In other words, Databand.ai comes with a suite of products and a team of employees who know how to turn giant troves of data into useful insights.

According to IBM:

A rapidly growing market opportunity, data observability is quickly emerging as a key solution for helping data teams and engineers better understand the health of data in their system and automatically identify, troubleshoot and resolve issues, like anomalies, breaking data changes or pipeline failures, in near real-time.

Quick take: There’s a lot more to the world of big data than you might think. With this acquisition, IBM not only gets software solutions it can integrate to its current cornucopia of management and analytics tools, but it also gets a team that’s ready to hit the ground running for the company’s clients.

Databand.ai just finished a funding round prior to the acquisition wherein it raised over $14 million — that’s a pretty good indication the company’s on solid footing.

Here at Neural, we love it. Databand’s joining a company whose CEO has their finger firmly on the pulse of big data and IBM’s expanding its already industry-leading portfolio of AI-powered solutions.