Continuing its bid to be a leader in the hybrid cloud world, IBM today announced the acquisition of Gravitant, an 11-year-old company whose software helps broker the public and private clouds options for enterprise IT.

It's the latest chess move as the big IT players vie for relevance in a cloud world that's been dominated by Amazon Web Services (AWS).

HP is dropping out of the public cloud business, putting more emphasis on cloud management, and that might be the eventual direction for most IT companies. For now, though, companies including Oracle and VMware are offering their own cloud services to compete with AWS.

IBM is in that camp with SoftLayer, and it's sometimes cited as one of the four giants likely to stay in the cloud business for the long term. (The others are AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud.)

Based in Austin, Texas, Gravitant offers software called cloudMatrix that provides one console showing the variety of cloud options available to the enterprise. This allows price comparisons and lets IT juggle the use of on- and off-premises resources, a practice Gravitant calls hybrid IT.

Gravitant is being added to IBM's Global Technology Services unit. Terms of the deal were not disclosed. Gravitant raised $40.3 million, according to Crunchbase, including a $25 million Series B a year ago.