Technology company IBM continues to strengthen its software portfolio across artificial intelligence (AI) and automation with the acquisition of data observability software firm Databand.ai, which is based in Tel Aviv, Israel. The acquisition closed on June 27, 2022 and no financial details were disclosed.

Databand.ai’s data observability software helps organizations fix issues with their data, including errors, pipeline failures, and poor quality before it impacts their bottom line. It also ensures that that trustworthy data is being put into the right hands of the right users at the right time.

“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,” said Daniel Hernandez, general manager for Data and AI, IBM.

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IBM has beean on an acquisition spree as this is the fifth for the year as the company bolsters its hybrid cloud and AI skills and capabilities. IBM has acquired more than 25 companies since Arvind Krishna became CEO in April 2020. The acquisition of Databand.ai builds on IBM’s research and development investments as well as strategic acquisitions in AI and automation. By using Databand.ai with IBM Observability by Instana APM and IBM Watson Studio, IBM aims to address the full spectrum of observability across IT operations.

Data

Data is the new currency and structured and trustworthy data will enable companies to make better business decisions.

According to IBM, 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.

Citing market intelligence firm Gartner, IBM said “every year poor data quality costs organizations an average of $12.9 million. To help mitigate this challenge, the data observability market is poised for strong growth.”

“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, Databand.ai. “That’s why global brands 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.”

Data engineering

Data observability uses 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. 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.

Databand.ai’s open and extendable approach allows data engineering teams to easily integrate and gain observability into their data infrastructure. This acquisition will unlock more resources for Databand.ai to expand its observability capabilities for broader integrations across more of the open source and commercial solutions that power the modern data stack. Enterprises will also have full flexibility in how to run Databand.ai, whether as-a-Service (SaaS) or a self-hosted software subscription.

The acquisition of Databand.ai further extends IBM’s existing data fabric solution by helping ensure that the most accurate and trustworthy data is being put into the right hands at the right time no matter where it resides.

Databand.ai employees will join IBM Data and AI, further building on IBM’s growing portfolio of Data and AI products, including its IBM Watson capabilities and IBM Cloud Pak for Data.