IBM acquisition of Databand.ai aims to help enterprises catch “bad data” at the source

IBM has acquired Databand.ai, a leading provider of data observability software that helps organizations fix issues with their data, including errors, pipeline failures and poor quality, before it impacts their bottom-line. Databand.ai is IBM’s fifth acquisition in 2022 as the company continues to bolster its hybrid cloud and AI skills and capabilities. Since Arvind Krishna became CEO in April 2020, IBM has acquired more than 25 companies.

With this latest acquisition, IBM’s software portfolio will be further strengthened across data, AI and automation to address the full spectrum of observability. This will help businesses ensure that trustworthy data is being put into the right hands of the right users at the right time.

As the volume of data continues to grow at an unprecedented pace, organizations are struggling to manage the health and quality of their data sets necessary to make better business decisions and gain competitive advantages.

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.

According to Gartner, poor data quality costs organizations an average $12.9 million every year. To help mitigate this challenge, the data observability market is poised for strong growth as it 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. 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...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  and , IBM is well-positioned to address the full spectrum of observability across IT operations. Together, Databand.ai and IBM Instana provide a more complete and explainable view of the entire application infrastructure and data platform system, which can help organizations prevent lost revenue and reputation.“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.”Enterprises will have full flexibility in how to run Databand.ai, whether as-a-Service (SaaS) or a self-hosted software subscription.