IBM has bought private cloud provider Blue Box Group, adding more OpenStack expertise to its portfolio.

The 12-year-old service provider offers a simple private cloud platform, and IBM hopes this will help it deploy services quicker and more simply.  built on OpenStack. Blue Box will become part of the Bluemix managed cloud service built on Cloud Foundry.  

Hybrid clouds rule

Around 72 percent of organizations are expected to be running hybrid clouds this year, according to Gartner research, and Blue Box will help IBM service these customers, by easing the integration of public cloud with on-promises solutions.

IBM already had expertise with the OpenStack opensource cloud platform, but Blue Box brings its own remote management offering, which should help with those hybrid implementatins.

IBM now has 500 developers working on open cloud projects. and claims to have twice as many customers on the IBM private cloud platform as the next closest vendor - according to Forrester Research.

“IBM is dedicated to helping our clients migrate to the cloud in an open, secure, data rich environment that meet their current and future business needs,” said IBM general manager of cloud services Jim Comfort. 

Meanwhile Blue Box founder and CTO Jesse Proudman welcomed his new overlords owners: ”This acquisition signals the beginning of new OpenStack options delivered by IBM. Now is the time to arm customers with more efficient development, delivery and lower cost solutions than they’ve seen thus far in the market.”

IBM “currently plans” to continue to support Blue Box clients and update their technologies, but also offer them other IBM services.

IBM claims cloud revenue for public private and hybrid deployments was $7.7 billion over the year ending in March 2015; having grown more than 60 percent in first quarter of 2015. IBM’s cloud service business is based on its purchase of SoftLayer, and the rollout of multiple data centers worldwide.