IBM Acquires Observability Platform Databand.ai

IBM has announced the acquisition of data observability software vendor Databand.ai. Today’s announcement marks IBM’s fifth acquisition of 2022. The company says the acquisition “further strengthens IBM’s software portfolio across data, AI, and automation to address the full spectrum of observability and helps businesses ensure that trustworthy data is being put into the right hands of the right users at the right time.”

Data observability is an expanding sector in the big data market, spurred by explosive growth in the amount of data organizations are producing and managing. Data quality issues can arise with large volumes, and Gartner shows that poor data quality costs businesses $12.9 million a year on average.

“Data observability takes traditional data operations to the next level by using historical trends to compute statistics about data workloads and data pipelines directly at the source, determining if they are working, and pinpointing where any problems may exist,” said IBM in a press release. “When combined with a full stack observability strategy, it can help IT teams quickly surface and resolve issues from infrastructure and applications to data and machine learning systems.”

IBM says this acquisition will extend Databand.ai’s resources for expanding its observability capabilities for broader integration across more open source and commercial solutions, and enterprises will have flexibility in how they run Databand.ai, either with a subscription or as-a-Service.

IBM has made over 25 strategic acquisitions since Arvind Krishna took the helm as CEO in April 2020. The company mentions that Databand.ai will be used with IBM Observability by Instana APM, another observability acquisition, and IBM Watson Studio, its data science platform, to address the full spectrum of observability across IT operations. To provide a more complete view of a data platform, Databand.ai can alert data teams and engineers when data they are working with is incomplete or missing, while Instana can explain which application the missing data originates from and why the application service is failing.

A dashboard view of Databand.ai’s observability platform. Source: Databand.ai

“Our clients are data-driven enterprises who rely on high-quality, trustworthy data to power their mission-critical processes. When they don’t have access to the data they need in any given moment, their business can grind to a halt,” said Daniel Hernandez, General Manager for Data and AI, IBM. “With the addition of Databand.ai, IBM offers the most comprehensive set of observability capabilities for IT across applications, data and machine learning, and is continuing to provide our clients and partners with the technology they need to deliver trustworthy data and AI at scale.”

Databand.ai is headquartered in Tel Aviv, and its employees will join IBM’s Data and AI division to grow its portfolio of data and AI products, including Watson and IBM Cloud Pak for Data.

“You can’t protect what you can’t see, and when the data platform is ineffective, everyone is impacted –including customers,” said Josh Benamram, co-founder and CEO of Databand.ai. “That’s why global brands such as FanDuel, Agoda and Trax Retail already rely on Databand.ai to remove bad data surprises by detecting and resolving them before they create costly business impacts. Joining IBM will help us scale our software and significantly accelerate our ability to meet the evolving needs of enterprise clients.”

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