Barely two weeks after snapping up a low-key consultancy to help boost its struggling professional services division, IBM Corp. is making another strategic acquisition aimed at augmenting an even more important part of its business: The SoftLayer public cloud. The object storage technology that Cleversafe Inc. brings to the table should provide a valuable asset to use against the competition.

The dsNet platform builds on the more than 350 patents that the Chicago-based outfit produced over its eleven-year history to reliably accommodate video, text documents and other unstructured records that are difficult to manage in traditional storage models. Cleversafe claims that it’s able to store up to exabytes worth of such data without compromising on that efficiency or reducing accessibility.

IBM plans to incorporate the technology into the object storage component of SoftLayer in order to support the growing amounts of information that its customers are keeping on the platform more effectively. That service will constitute the public cloud component of a hybrid value proposition that will also include Cleversafe’s existing on-premise dsNET appliances.

Those in turn are slated to move under the umbrella of the Spectrum software-defined storage lineup that IBM launched earlier this year. Once the technology is fully integrated into its portfolio, customers will presumably be able to keep their most sensitive data behind the firewall and migrate the rest to SoftLayer in order to optimize their costs.

Transferring data among environments that are based on the same storage technology is a lot more straightforward than moving to and from a platform with an entirely different architecture, like, say, Amazon Inc.’s competing public cloud. This interoperability should make SoftLayer that much more attractive than its rival for customers interested in implementing that kind of hybrid operating model, but IBM still has an uphill battle to fight in the infrastructure-as-a-service space.

No terms were disclosed for the deal other than the transaction is expected to complete later this year. However, given the fact that Cleversafe has raised more than $100 million in capital from investors and reported triple-digit revenue growth for the first half of this year, the acquisition is likely valued at several multiples of its total external funding.

Image via Geralt