IBM announces acquisition of Pliant to enhance Network IT automation capabilities

IBM has acquired Pliant, a leading provider of network and IT infrastructure automation products. Pliant adds essential capabilities to automate network and IT infrastructure tasks and abstract these functions to the application layer, enabling applications (and developers) maximum control for simplified provisioning and management of infrastructure directly within applications themselves. These optimizations include infrastructure resource provisioning and management, traffic management and configuration management or both traditional network & IT infrastructure and public clouds.

With the acquisition of Pliant, IBM will provide clients the ability to radically simplify the automation of their infrastructure and network with a tool that securely automates, integrates, and connects the platforms, services, and applications within their environments.

Founded in 2017, Pliant boasts an extensive library of out-of-the-box integrations with third party vendors and the ability to integrate technology that has an API or is command line interface (CLI) enabled. Pliant is complementary with other API approaches and supports deployments in private clouds and on-premises data centers.

Delivered as both a client managed software and SaaS product, Pliant’s design approach to automation aligns with IBM’s vision to build and grow a product portfolio that leverages low-code and no-code capabilities to make IT tools and skills accessible to a wider range of developers and engineers.

IBM is innovating through a combination of R&D and strategic acquisitions to deliver the data, AI, and automation solutions that businesses need to manage an increasingly complex network infrastructure. The acquisition will extend the current Software portfolio - SevOne, Cloud Pak for Network Automation (CP4NA), Hybrid Cloud Mesh (HCM), IBM NS1 Connect and Edge Application Manager - to provide enterprises with products that enable network infrastructure observability, connectivity, control, and automation across hybrid cloud environments.

This marks IBM’s second acquisition announced in 2024. Since Arvind Krishna became CEO in April 2020, IBM has acquired more than 40 companies to bolster its hybrid cloud and artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities. Financial details of the deal were not disclosed.