IBM today made good on executive comments just last week that IBM was anxious to continue its recent buying spree. The latest purchase was application management and and monitoring firm Turbonomic.

IBM claims the acquisition will help customers assure optimal performance and minimize costs by using artificial intelligence (AI) to optimize resources like containers, virtual machines (VMs), servers, storage, networks, and databases. IBM plans to integrate Turbonomic's application resource management and network monitoring capabilities into a full-stack observability platform.

“Businesses are looking for AI-driven software to help them manage the scale and complexity challenges of running applications cross-cloud,” Turbonomic CEO Ben Nye said in a statement. “Turbonomic not only prescribes actions, but allows customers to take them. The combination of IBM and Turbonomic will continuously assure target application response times even during peak demand.”

While IBM hasn't said how much it will pay for Turbonomic, the Boston-based company has raised approximately $150 million in funding across five funding rounds since 2008, and Crunchbase estimates it has a market valuation of between $500 million and $1 billion.

IBM plans to integrate Turbonomic’s application resource management capabilities into its IBM Cloud Pak for Watson AIOps, and the application performance monitoring capabilities acquired with the purchase of Instana last December. The company claims these capabilities will enable customers to automatically optimize their underlying IT infrastructure to speed root-cause analysis and time to resolution, as well as allowing them to absorb spikes in demand without response times.

Additionally, IBM plans to put Turbonomic’s network performance monitoring capabilities to work optimizing application performance in telecommunications and 5G environments.

IBM also noted that the combined offering also has sustainability implications as the ability to “right-size” workloads may help to reduce server and data center carbon footprints.

The deal is expected to close in the second quarter of 2021.

The deal comes after IBM hinted that more acquisitions were on the way. IBM entered 2021 with around $14 billion of cash on hand and expects to generate around $16 billion of new cash flow by the end of the year.

While much of this 30 billion in cash will be tied to debt maturities, dividend payments, and structure changes, including those associated with the spin-off of its newly named Kyndryl managed infrastructure business, there’s plenty left over to fuel future acquisitions, noted IBM CFO Jim Kavanaugh during the company’s Q1 earnings call last week.

“We feel very confident and we will capitalize, whether there’s any inorganic opportunities and you’re seeing … 11 acquisitions since Arvind has taken over and we’ll continue to capitalize, where it makes the right client value, in the right IBM value, at the right economic equation going forward, but we’re not constrained by sources and uses of cash,” Kavanaugh said on the call, referencing company CEO Arvind Krishna, who took over leadership of IBM last year.

IBM’s ambition to develop a full-stack observability platform somewhat mirrors that of networking giant Cisco, which late last month announced a similar effort.

Cisco’s observability platform ties together its AppDynamic's application performance monitoring suite with ThousandEye’s network monitoring capabilities. Cisco acquired ThousandEyes last year for $1 billion, while the networking giant snapped up AppDynamics in 2017 for $3.7 billion.

The vendor claims the combined offering will enable network and development operations teams to accelerate root cause analysis. This is critical, the vendor claims, as organizations move to adopt software-as-a-service (SaaS) and cloud-based services and become increasingly reliant on networks and services that are outside their control.