Feature
IBM announced it has bought up England-based Butterfly Software, and the move gives us a peek into just how seriously IBM is about the cloud and big data.
Butterfly's core competency is data storage and migration, and IBM should be able to harness that to bolster its analytics, cloud and storage capabilities.
Cloud Implications
IBM's push into the cloud seems to be going pretty well, and storage is obviously always going to be an issue in this space. In August, IBM even added cloud computing to its newest zEnterprise mainframe release, a move that the added migration capabilites from Butterfly will no doubt help along.
Butterfly Storage specializes in data migration, a key IT process that cloud systems need to be successful.
Additionally, organizing and moving all that data to the cloud is a great chance to analyze what is there. This is the story of big data. By taking a company's old data and getting it organized for a move into the cloud, IBM can take a fresh look at that data for key insights.
IBM's Recent Moves
As the role of IT changes and IBM evolves accordingly, the Butterfly aquisition is shown as a key piece of IBM's strategy. Though a less sexy buy for IBM, Butterfly helps by supplying some computational muscle behind all the apps and communication that happens on top of it. In the future, if IBM were to make a real play for say, RIM, the company that makes BlackBerry, the added storage from Butterfly would be surely needed.
Furthermore, as IBM's recent purchase of Kenexa shows, the changes being made in business by social media will also be affected by the Butterfly addition. IBM has not released any financial information on the Butterfly deal, but we do know Butterfly will become part of IBM's Software Group.
