IBM acquires data observability firm Databand.ai

Tech major IBM has acquired Databand.ai, a provider of data observability software that helps organizations fix issues with their data, including errors, pipeline failures and poor quality. The acquisition, according to IBM, will help the company carve out a piece of the growing data observability market, which was estimated by analyst firm IDC to be around $5 billion in 2020, expanding significantly year-over-year.

Headquartered in Tel Aviv, Israel, 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. Financial details of the deal were not disclosed, said a company statement. 

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

Observability, in general, is a relatively new term in IT, used to describe the task of monitoring enterprise applications, data flow and distributed infrastructure. Companies including Datadog, New Relic, Dynatrace, Honeycomb, Sumo Logic, Cisco AppDynamics, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Oracle and Microsoft offer full stack observability tools and services.

Data observability is a subset of full-stack observability that deals with understanding on why a data set is not acting as desired. As organisations struggle with increased volumes of data, these platforms provide the necessary tools for data engineers to quickly figure out whether data products such as analytics dashboards or machine learning (ML) models are working properly and in case of a failure, identify, troubleshoot and resolve issues in near real-time. According to trsearch firm  Gartner, every year poor data quality costs organizations an average $12.9 million. To help mitigate this challenge, the data observability market is poised for strong growth. 

"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."

Also, this is not IBM’s first observability-related acquisition. The company acquired German software firm Instana in November, 2020, to target the application performance monitoring market from a hybrid cloud standpoint.