IBM acquired telco consulting services provider Sentaca in a bid to bolster its position in the cloud-native and hybrid-cloud market for wireless operators. The deal marks at least 20 acquisitions for IBM since CEO Arvind Krishna assumed his position in 2020, including 10 in the realm of consulting.

The 14-year-old company joins IBM Consulting’s Hybrid Cloud Services business and will play a broader role in IBM’s mission to help network providers transition to cloud-native, open, and hybrid infrastructure in the 5G era.

“We believe that as our clients enter the 5G domain that the fundamental principle for them to unleash the value is to move from vertical stacks to an open, hybrid, horizontal stack,” IBM VP Steve Goetz told SDxCentral in a phone interview.

The Sentaca acquisition “is one step, certainly not the only step, not even the most material step, but one step in that journey to get us where we want to be,” he added.

IBM wants to support its telco clients as a systems integrator and technology provider to be “agents of business transformation across industry,” Goetz said. “The end game is to realize the business outcomes for our clients for this investment” in 5G network infrastructure.

Goetz contends that 5G will fundamentally impact the future of every industry, and notes that dynamic challenges every player to articulate solid business cases to reach that vision. This requires risk mitigation, deliberate investment, and an understanding of the total cost of ownership, he said. 

“There’s always a unique set of challenges but my money is on the industry. They’ve been able to do it before, and they’ll do it again. And once they nail this one, they’ll have to deal with 6G. This is progress,” Goetz said. 

IBM expects the Boston-based Sentaca to strengthen its ability to help carriers modernize their infrastructure and critical applications with its open source platforms such as Red Hat OpenShift and OpenStack. IBM claims it works with more than 80% of the world’s largest network operators, including more than 140 telcos that are served by IBM and Red Hat, the open source company it acquired for $34 billion in July 2019.

5G “is an agent of change across all industries and it’s up to those that grab it first and will actually receive the most value from it,” Goetz said. 

“It’s not a revelation that this technology that’s being deployed today is really an enterprise type play,” he added. Each wireless carrier has specific domain expertise across large, medium, and small businesses, and the differences among carriers are typically clear based on the segments they respectively target, according to Goetz.

Financial terms of the Sentaca acquisition, which closed last week, were not disclosed.