IBM Aims to Capture Growing Market Opportunity for Data Observability with Databand.ai Acquisition

IBM) announced iit's acquisition of 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. Today's news 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.

Databand.ai is IBM's fifth acquisition in 2022 as the company continues to bolster its hybrid cloud and AI skills and capabilities. IBM has acquired more than 25 companies since Arvind Krishna became CEO in April 2020.

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, which is necessary to make better business decisions and gain a competitive advantage. A rapidly growing market opportunity, 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, 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.¹

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. 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 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 is well-positioned to address the full spectrum of observability across IT operations.

For example, Databand.ai capabilities can alert data teams and engineers when the data they are using to fuel an analytics system is incomplete or missing. In common cases where data originates from an enterprise application, Instana can then help users quickly explain exactly where the missing data originated from and why an application service is failing. 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." 

Data observability solutions are also a key part of an organization's broader data strategy and architecture. 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.

"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 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. 

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. The acquisition closed on June 27, 2022.