IBM, on Thursday announced that it has signed a definitive agreement to acquire Sanovi Technologies, a privately held company that provides hybrid cloud recovery, cloud migration and business continuity software for enterprise data centers and cloud infrastructure. Adding these capabilities along with advanced analytics will better enable IBM to bolster its Software Defined Resiliency strategy and delivery of Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery services for clients undergoing digital and hybrid cloud transformation.

With Sanovi’s software, IBM will further empower clients to redefine their disaster recovery strategy in the face of unprecedented industry change. The addition of Sanovi’s orchestration technology to IBM’s existing resiliency portfolio offers a solution that helps simplify and automate the disaster recovery process, helps to manage recovery workflows, and can help to reduce recovery time, operating costs, and disaster recovery drill testing time.

From a central dashboard, resiliency professionals can automate and monitor recovery point and time objectives in their disaster recovery environments by application, server, or data base to work towards business driven recovery outcomes. We feel that this will be a crucial differentiator for clients making decisions on their risk posture, as many still use paper based exercises or sample tests based on estimations that potentially mischaracterize actual recovery time and recovery point objectives of their applications.

"Our clients are embracing a digitized world where applications need to be ‘always-on. As a cloud-native company, Sanovi will strengthen our resiliency portfolio to manage the broad range of applications, data, and IT systems of our clients balancing digital and hybrid cloud transformation with increased regulatory compliance,” said Martin Jetter, Senior Vice President, Global Technology Services, IBM.

Upon close, which is expected by the end of 2016, IBM plans to integrate the Sanovi capabilities into the IBM Global Technology Services unit. IBM Resiliency Services is continuously evolving to learn, anticipate and confront the growing range of natural and man-made risks surrounding businesses today and was named a Leader for the second consecutive year in Gartner’s June 2016 Magic Quadrant for Disaster Recovery as a Service. Moving forward, IBM envisions leveraging Watson Analytics to expand Sanovi's Disaster Recovery Management (DRM) capabilities and enable organizations to move from business continuity planning to more proactive resiliency programs that help anticipate potential failures before they happen.

“IBM’s technology leadership in hybrid cloud infrastructure and resiliency services makes it a clear choice to bring end-to-end services to our customers and transformational value to IBM’s existing client base. Together, we will provide next-generation resiliency solutions for robust hybrid cloud deployments across the globe,” said Chandra Sekhar Pulamarasetti, Co-Founder & CEO of Sanovi.

In addition to being available as part of a managed resiliency service, IBM plans to make Sanovi DRM available as a stand-alone software license for partners and customers looking to optimize in-house and vendor run resiliency programs.