Intel’s buying spree continued as the chip giant bought Israel-based software vendor Granulate Cloud Solutions.

While neither party disclosed the terms of the deal, Granulate has raised approximately $45 million in funding since it was founded in 2018, Crunchbase reports.

The acquisition contributes to a growing portfolio of software optimization tools designed to help customers right-size their applications to the available compute resources, Intel CTO Greg Lavender said in a statement. Granulate offers a real-time continuous optimization software platform that promises to help cloud and data center customers to get more out of their hardware while simultaneously reducing operating costs.

The company’s software platform is designed to reduce CPU utilization and application latency by learning customers’ applications and automatically optimizing them at runtime. This allows for more efficient use of resources on smaller compute clusters, which ultimately drives down costs, the company said.

“We believe we can help customers achieve meaningful cost reductions and five times the throughput across workloads,” boasted Granulate CEO Asaf Ezra in a statement.

More importantly, “Granulate’s cutting-edge autonomous optimization software can be applied to production workloads without requiring the customer to make changes to its code,” said Sandra Rivera, EVP and GM of the data center and AI group at Intel, in a statement.

This addresses one of the biggest challenges Intel sees across modern data centers as customers transition from monolithic architectures to cloud-native, microservice-based applications. While these architectures offer greater scalability, they also introduce “complex performance issues that are not easily managed by traditional operating systems or runtimes,” the company said.

Shared history

Granulate is no stranger to Intel. The two companies have a longstanding relationship going back to 2019, when the startup graduated from the Intel Ignite accelerator program. Granulate’s 120 employees will join Intel’s data center and AI business unit when the acquisition closes later this year.

In a recent podcast, Patrick Moorhead, president and principal analyst at Moor Insights & Strategy, said he wouldn't be surprised to see Granulate's technology integrated directly into a low-level firmware or driver in such a way that the end user doesn't have to do anything to implement the technology.

Moorhead's co-host, Daniel Newman, principal analyst at Futurum, said the acquisition positions Intel to directly address customers' data center challenges.

"This acquisition gives Intel the opportunity to expand their story and help customers reduce CPU utilization and app latencies, which is a big thing that every company is doing. They are either buying software to monitor it, and in this case, they're looking at ways to implement it where the customer doesn't have to think about it," he said.