HFS Highlight: IBM joins the war for Hyperscaler Talent, Acquires Taos to boost Multi-Cloud and MSP Offerings

IBM’s Taos acquisition is excellent news for C-suite executives leading their business’ journey to become cloud-native. The purchase, announced on January 14, 2021, promises more choice to IBM’s customers with hybrid and multi-cloud platforms while allowing Taos’ customers to benefit from global services and enhanced application orchestration capabilities.  

Customers can expect dealings with these firms to offer enhancements to both scale and skill in their efforts in migrating, developing, and managing applications across any cloud platform. With access to experts with in-depth development and migration capabilities to Microsoft’s Azure, Amazon’s AWS, Google Cloud Platform, or IBM’s cloud, enterprises can maintain freedom of choice. When combined with IBM’s tools, they can accelerate the adoption of cloud-native applications, workflows, and process orchestration.  

Taos CEO, Hamilton Yu, cited three things to HFS the market would benefit from their joining IBM, these included: 

1. Continued Multi-cloud orchestration.  

Build once in the cloud of choice and integrate, manage, and orchestrate later. IBM adds skills and solutions that can benefit Taos customers who have successfully deployed applications in a multi-cloud environment. Taos and IBM can work with a growing number of customers to mitigate technology debt by implementing industry-leading orchestration tools with a large stable of applications and business services professionals.  

2. Accelerate Platform and Application Modernization.  

Before IBM’s acquisition, Taos was primarily a platform engineering organization; now, it can leverage both companies’ strengths to speed application modernization. While both companies have expertise and tools for DevOps, Taos’ web-centric methodologies with IBM’s automation and management solutions provide scale and reduce risks.  

3. Better service global customer needs.  

Taos strong relationship with hyperscalers (GCP, Azure, & AWS) offers flexibility. Customers can choose which cloud-native environments are best for their business or technology requirements. At the same time, IBM resources bolster the number of cloud professions that can deliver more localized enhancements.  

Through the recent acquisitions of Taos and Nordcloud, IBM adds service breadth by adding to its stable of certified cloud professionals sending a clear message to the market that it is committed to flexibility across its cloud offerings. IBM also joins the staffing war to ensure it has certified professionals suited to the development and migration needs required to adopt, deploy, and manage cloud-based services successfully.  

While we are generally optimistic about this acquisition, from HFS’s point of view, IBM customers must be willing to consider adopting other IBM solutions, like Red Hat OpenShift, to get the most from application orchestration. While both IBM and Taos will operate separately, to move beyond just platform re-engineering, OpenShift, IBM’s cloud automation platform, and Red Hat’s Ansible will likely be part of making the journey possible.  

The Bottom Line: IBM and Taos add skills and broadens customer reach.  

Customers benefit from the combined expertise, scale, and services capabilities of IBM and Taos. While Taos will continue to operate under its own brand, access to IBM people, intellectual property, and tools to accelerate multi-cloud orchestration and the extraction of data and workflow can help executives pursue HFS’ vision of the Digital OneOffice with IBM.  

HFS sees a growing need for Hyperscale Services companies to offer a strong portfolio of solutions to the end customer. To ensure their cloud efforts will yield business value, customers should audit their provider’s ability to assess, migrate, automate, develop, manage, secure, and govern their multi-cloud and hybrid cloud solutions. With its growing portfolio of associated companies, IBM provides a strong portfolio of assessment, migration, tools, and management solutions that enhance its global service delivery capabilities.