Writing professionally since 2004, Charmayne Smith focuses on corporate materials such as training manuals, business plans, grant applications and technical manuals. Smith's articles have appeared in the "Houston Chronicle" and on various websites, drawing on her extensive experience in corporate management and property/casualty insurance.

Developer security operations startup OX Appsec Security Ltd. announced today that it has received an investment of an undisclosed amount from IBM Ventures.

Founded in 2021 by Neatsun Ziv and Lior Arzi, both veterans of Check Point Software Technology Ltd.’s security division, OX Security offers an end-to-end security solution designed to prevent attacks across the software supply chain.

As noted when the company last raised funding in September, OX Security has developed an entirely new software security standard known as the Pipeline Bill of Materials that has been designed to assist enterprises in better securing their software supply chains. The PBOM standard is based on the “software bill of materials” that declares the inventory of components used to build an application.

In the company’s own words, it’s building “the first holistic software supply chain security solution — going beyond the CI/CD or SDLC and providing visibility, automation and risk insights from Code-to-Cloud-to-Code.” In doing so, OX aims to make software supply chain security processes effortless for security teams to manage and easy for developers to adopt.

“This investment from IBM is proof that OX’s holistic security solution for today’s modern software supply chains is the right solution at the right time,” Neatsun Ziv, co-founder and chief executive of OX Security, said in a statement. He added that OX will work closely with IBM and the team at its Red Hat unit, helping enterprise customers bake security into product development.

OX Security has raised about $34 million to date, not including the IBM round, according to data from Crunchbase. Previous investors in the company include Intel Ignite Fund L.P., Evolution Equity Partners LLC, M12 LLC, Rain Capital LP and Team8 Capital Partners LP.

The company was last in the news in May when it launched OX-GPT, a ChatGPT integration to Strengthen software supply chain security. The integration offers developers customized fix recommendations and cut-and-paste code fixes, providing for quick remediation of critical security issues across the software supply chain.

Image: OX Security

$4.6 billion acquisition to advance IBM's existing resource optimization, observability and application management offerings, maximize value for clients and drive significant synergies across several IBM growth areas

ARMONK, N.Y., June 26, 2023 /PRNewswire/ -- IBM (NYSE: IBM) today announced that it has entered into a definitive agreement with Vista Equity Partners to purchase Apptio Inc., a leader in financial and operational IT management and optimization (FinOps) software, for $4.6 billion. The acquisition of Apptio will accelerate the advancement of IBM's IT automation capabilities and enable enterprise leaders to deliver enhanced business value across technology investments.

Organizations are digitally transforming their businesses faster than ever, causing IT environments to expand across public and private clouds, with multiple service providers. To manage this dramatic increase in complexity, clients are turning to Apptio's solutions for integrated and simplified visibility into technology spend across hybrid and multi-cloud environments, labor and associated resources. Apptio, together with IBM's IT automation software and it's watsonx AI platform, will help businesses around the world manage and optimize enterprise IT spend and derive tangible financial value and operational improvement.

Apptio is an established, growing and profitable technology business management and FinOps leader, with over 1,500 clients, serving more than half of the Fortune 100. Industry recognized, Apptio partners and integrates with leading companies such as Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform, Salesforce, ServiceNow, Oracle and SAP, consistent with IBM's commitment to an open partner ecosystem.

Apptio empowers enterprise leaders to manage technology spend and direct investments to high-value cloud innovation and digital transformation. The company has three core offerings, all delivered as software as a service (SaaS) – ApptioOne, Apptio Cloudability, and Apptio Targetprocess:

• ApptioOne: Hybrid cloud spend management and optimization capabilities to analyze, optimize and plan IT spend and value. ApptioOne is used to establish repeatable and accurate planning and financial management processes, delivering actionable insights around cost and utilization, while benchmarking against industry peers for continuous optimization.
   
• Apptio Cloudability: Public cloud spend management visibility and optimization capabilities, connecting multi-cloud and SaaS infrastructure with cloud financial management best practices to maximize the value of clients' cloud strategy.
   
• Apptio Targetprocess: Agile investment planning capabilities to align development resources to business outcomes, plan and track value delivery for projects or products.

"Technology is changing business at a rate and pace we've never seen before. To capitalize on these changes, it is essential to optimize investments which drive better business value, and Apptio does just that," said Arvind Krishna, CEO and chairman, IBM. "Apptio's offerings combined with IBM's IT automation software and watsonx AI platform, gives clients the most comprehensive approach to optimize and manage all of their technology investments."

Apptio and the performance optimization and observability capabilities of IBM's IT automation software like Turbonomic, Instana and AIOps, will deliver clients a 360-degree technology business management platform, providing a "virtual command center" for spend management and optimization stretching across their entire technology landscape. In addition, Apptio will bring to IBM $450 billion of anonymized IT spend data, unlocking new insights for clients and partners.

The acquisition of Apptio is a continuation of IBM's deep focus and investment in hybrid cloud and AI and is expected to drive significant synergies across several key growth areas for IBM, including automation, Red Hat, IBM's broader AI portfolio, and IBM Consulting, as well as strong partnership with other leading systems integrators like Accenture, KPMG, Deloitte and EY. IBM will also deliver new innovation by augmenting watsonx with Apptio's anonymized FinOps data. Additionally, Apptio is expected to benefit from IBM's long-established scale and reach, working with clients and partners across more than 175 countries.

"Our customers are evolving to a complex digital-first, hybrid world where technology investments are distributed and decentralized but all innovation must be aligned with clear business outcomes," explained Sunny Gupta, Apptio co-founder and CEO. "We are so excited to be joining IBM and combining our industry leading offerings with IBM's global presence and strong portfolio across AIOps, automation and hybrid cloud offerings."

"We are committed to building resilient enterprise software companies, which has proven to be highly attractive to strategic and financial buyers, as well as public markets," said Robert F. Smith, founder, chairman and CEO of Vista Equity Partners. "Our investment philosophy, value creation strategy, and industry expertise, enables us to identify and partner with companies that have the potential for long-term success. Apptio has transformed how leading organizations optimize their IT spend and performance for better outcomes. We are proud of these shared accomplishments and look forward to seeing Apptio further evolve with IBM."

Apptio will be acquired with available cash on hand. The transaction is subject to regulatory approvals and other customary closing conditions and is expected to close in the latter half of 2023.

About IBM

IBM is a leading provider of global hybrid cloud and AI, and consulting expertise. We help clients in more than 175 countries capitalize on insights from their data, streamline business processes, reduce costs and gain the competitive edge in their industries. Thousands of government and corporate entities in critical infrastructure areas such as financial services, telecommunications and healthcare rely on IBM's hybrid cloud platform and Red Hat OpenShift to affect their digital transformations quickly, efficiently and securely. IBM's breakthrough innovations in AI, quantum computing, industry-specific cloud solutions and consulting deliver open and flexible options to our clients. All of this is backed by IBM's legendary commitment to trust, transparency, responsibility, inclusivity and service. Visit  www.ibm.com  for more information.  

Press Contacts:

Tim Davidson, 914-844-7847
tfdavids@us.ibm.com

Sarah Meron, 347-891-1770
sarah.meron@ibm.com

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BLACK HAT USA – Las Vegas – Wednesday, Aug. 9 The founder and lead of the open-source OWASP's dependency-check project has devised what he thinks is a solution to the problem of securing the software supply chain, using a novel process called binary source validation.

The idea of binary source validation involves inspecting software at a layer deeper than the software's source code, to look at the build artifacts created while coding, and validate them as legitimate, explains long-time software developer Jeremy Long, principal engineer at ServiceNow and an OSWAP guru. He notes that software bills of material (SBOMs) that provide a view into source code simply aren't sufficient security measures. 

The kernel of the binary validation idea lies in a well-known 1984 paper entitled "Reflections on Trusting Trust" by Ken Thompson, the co-author of Unix, which outlined the process of compromising a code compiler with a backdoor in such a way that the backdoor does not appear in the published source code. Yet, if a developer uses the compromised compiler to create next version of the software, it injects the backdoor into that compiler. Subsequently, if a developer compiles the OS with the compiler, the backdoor also gets injected into the OS. This scenario is how Thompson himself dropped a backdoor deep into Unix, he revealed in his paper.

"[The backdoor] is never in the source code, it's only in the binary output of the compiler," Long explains. Because of this, developer tools that can validate runtime dependencies in source code won't be of any help to developers to spot the backdoor — or any malicious code, for that matter — in their overall software build, he says.

"We are not looking deeply enough at how we are building software," he says.

Long will outline his solution and other issues at the heart of why the software supply chain is so difficult to secure in a session today called "Reflections on Trust in the Software Supply Chain," at the Black Hat USA 2023 conference in Las Vegas.

A Potential Solution to Software Supply Chain Attacks

In his research, Long focused on some of the higher-level programming languages, such as Java and .NET, for a demonstration of binary source validation. The closest solution that he's seen so far to the one he's envisioned is IBM's Code Genome project, which also springs from Thompson's paper and aims to provide a "semantically meaningful fingerprint" for software, according to the website for the project.

Binary source validation provides a way for developers to validate the artifact — for instance, the JAR file produced when developing software written in Java — independently rather than merely checking to see if the code produces what's called a "reproduceable build" as a way of software verification, he says.

"It's a way to really increase your assurance that your build has not been compromised," Long explains. "You can look at the instruction set in the binary and validate whether or not that could be produced by the source code."

SBOMs Aren't Enough for Software Build Security

SBOMs are often touted as giving organizations more visibility into what goes into their software, but Long explains that it's not enough.

SBOMs are an inventory of the components and runtime dependencies that ship with a piece of software, which can help ensure it does not include a known vulnerability before being deployed. But the fact that they deal only with known vulnerabilities makes SBOMs an incomplete way to tackle supply chain security.

A nascent effort to tackle this issue is what's called a formulation bill of materials. A formulation bill of materials — which has been added into a new version of an open source SBOM tool called CycloneDX — provides visibility into not only the dependencies that software requires to run, but also the details on how the software was built in terms of build platform, plug-ins, libraries, and other components, Long explains. That way, if any of these items has known vulnerabilities, they can be identified before deployment.

"[A formulation bill of materials] is absolutely a step in the right direction," Long says. However, it still provides largely forensic data post-breach that organizations can use to find out if they've deployed a vulnerable piece of software, not ensure the software is built from the ground up without malicious code, he notes.

"It still doesn't deal with zero-day type issues," Long says. "Nobody has the tooling [for this]."

Long sees binary source validation as a potential way to help solve the security issues that the software supply-chain faces, though it will take time to come to fruition, he acknowledges.

The research comes against a dramatic backdrop: A spate of high-impact software supply chain attacks over the last few years — among them SolarWinds and Log4j — demonstrate that attackers have cracked the code, literally, on how to target software to successfully mount attacks that can reach millions of systems through software dependencies. This issue has proven difficult to combat, as there is no easy way for developers to identify malicious code that's present in a component of an application before it's deployed across myriad systems. Moreover, tracking down vulnerable components in software that's already in use — even after flaws are identified — also is an extremely difficult task, as seen with Log4j.

Attackers increasingly are exploiting these complexities, and have taken their approach to a level that attacks software before it's even developed. Attacks on open source code libraries and other programming platforms and tools that developers use to write applications — such as Python, a popular target of late — are becoming more commonplace. Doing this gives malicious actors an indirect yet effective channel to attack multiple systems across the software supply chain in one fell swoop.

Jeddah: GoDaddy Inc. (NYSE: GDDY), the company that helps entrepreneurs thrive, is announcing the launch of the .AI domain extension in the Kingdom. This exciting addition opens up a world of opportunities for individuals, developers, startups, and research institutions, aligning perfectly with the Saudi Arabia’s visionary AI strategy and dynamic growth in the field of artificial intelligence.

As a part of its commitment to foster AI potential, The Kingdom has established the Saudi Data & AI Authority (SDAIA) to drive the KSA Data & AI agenda and to outline a multi-phased approach with six dimensions such as ambition, skills, policies and regulations, investment, research and innovation, and ecosystem. The ultimate goal is to position KSA as a global hub for Data & AI activities and to create a strong domestic ecosystem.  

.AI domains bring numerous advantages to small businesses across various sectors. By associating with artificial intelligence (AI), these domains become powerful branding tools, projecting innovation and technological expertise to customers and stakeholders alike.

"Artificial intelligence (AI) is set to contribute $135 billion to Saudi Arabia's economy and will see AI's contribution to GDP rise to 12.4 percent in 2030, making it the biggest beneficiary of AI in the Middle East. 2 By introducing .AI domains in the Kingdom, we aim to provide a platform for businesses and individuals to fully embrace AI's transformative potential," commented Selina Bieber, Vice President, International Markets at GoDaddy.

GoDaddy provides a user-friendly tool to help entrepreneurs select the perfect domain name for their business. With GoDaddy Domain Names Creator, users can answer basic questions about their business and industry, receiving a series of domain suggestions that will make their company stand out on the web.

"Having seen the Kingdom's progress in AI firsthand, we are excited to be part of this journey by offering .AI domains, which will undoubtedly add value to the AI community in Saudi Arabia," added Bieber.

With the availability of .AI domains in Saudi Arabia, GoDaddy continues to support the nation's thriving AI community, making it easier for businesses and innovators to harness the potential of artificial intelligence and create a robust digital presence in this rapidly growing industry.

In the event that a desired domain is already owned, GoDaddy offers the assistance of dedicated domain brokers who can strategize and negotiate with the current domain owner to secure the best possible price while ensuring confidentiality.

"We firmly believe that the .AI domain extension will play a key role in shaping the future of AI-driven businesses in Saudi Arabia. It is a powerful branding tool that signifies technological expertise and innovation," Bieber explained.

The future of businesses in the Kingdom is set to be reshaped as an impressive 85 percent of business leaders foresee the transformative impact of generative AI on their customer offerings or business operations within the next three years, according to a accurate study.3 
The Kingdom's dedication to AI is reflected in its impressive global rankings. Saudi Arabia is the top-ranking country in the world for government strategy in artificial intelligence (AI). It scored 100% in all criteria related to AI, including establishing the National Strategy for Data and AI (NSDAI), having a dedicated government authority for AI, and adequate funding for AI initiatives.4

With the launch of .AI domains in Saudi Arabia, GoDaddy continues to be a trusted partner, empowering entrepreneurs, and innovators to take their ventures to new heights in the ever-evolving AI landscape. By securing a .AI domain, businesses can embrace the future, amplify their digital presence, and contribute to the Kingdom's remarkable journey towards becoming a global AI leader.

For more information about the .AI domain extension and how it can empower your business in the Kingdom's thriving AI community, visit ae.GoDaddy.com.

About GoDaddy:
GoDaddy helps millions of entrepreneurs globally start, grow, and scale their businesses. People come to GoDaddy to name their idea, build a professional website, attract customers, sell their products and services, and accept payments online and in-person. GoDaddy's easy-to-use tools help microbusiness owners manage everything in one place and its expert guides are available to provide assistance 24/7. To learn more about the company, visit www.GoDaddy.com

References:
1 https://ai.sa/
2 https://www.pwc.com/m1/en/publications/potential-impact-artificial-intelligence-middle-east.html
3 https://www.ibm.com/thought-leadership/institute-business-value/en-us/report/ceo-generative-ai/customer-service
4 https://www.arabnews.com/node/2331166/saudi-arabia

In June 1969, John E. Warnock achieved a milestone of sorts at the University of Utah by producing the shortest Ph.D. dissertation in the university's history.

A masterpiece of conciseness at 32 pages, the paper set forth a solution to the "hidden line problem," which applied to how computers could draw the outline of a form partially hidden behind another—for example, part of a triangle obscured by a ball—so that all the visible sides and angles line up convincingly.

Warnock, who died Saturday, went on to become one of the leading computer scientists of his era and co-founder in 1982 of Adobe Inc.

For those of us tethered to the computer in our professional or personal lives, his more momentous role is that of co-inventor of the PDF, the "page description format" that allows documents to appear on screen and be printed out as their creator intended, no matter which software or hardware is used to create them.

The PDF standard revolutionized desktop publishing. It's a required, or at least preferred, format for court filings, academic papers, consumer manuals—virtually every imaginable document in our increasingly paperless society.

And it originated in a project code-named "Camelot" that Warnock launched at Adobe in 1991, when the company was still working to establish a comfortable niche in what was turning into an internet-connected world.

Camelot yielded another concise paper—six pages that outlined a vision for a software suite that would allow users to "capture documents from any application, send electronic versions of these documents anywhere, and view and print these documents on any machines." The suite that followed was known as Acrobat, and its underlying format was the PDF.

Warnock's career traces the path of the computer industry in its earliest days. In the 1960s, the University of Utah became an important center of the still-fledgling discipline of computer science—so important, indeed, that in December 1969 it was among the first four nodes (along with UCLA, UC Santa Barbara and the Menlo Park-based research firm SRI) to be interconnected by the ARPANET, the network funded by the Pentagon's Advanced Research Projects Agency and the precursor to the internet.

Utah's specialty was computer graphics. Among Warnock's fellow students was Edwin Catmull, who would eventually become president of Pixar and Walt Disney Animation Studios and who created, as a student project, a short video in which his left hand was converted into a computer image, a landmark in 3D rendering. Warnock's Ph.D. thesis advisors were Utah professors David Evans and Ivan Sutherland, whose company, Evans and Sutherland, produced pioneering flight simulators.

Warnock was a member of a generation whose work transformed ordinary life as never before. The 1970s (including a few years preceding and following that decade) were a period of extraordinary innovations.

In 1968, Douglas Engelbart of SRI staged what has gone down in history as "the mother of all demos," introducing hyperlinks, the mouse, videoconferencing and other inventions to a rapt audience in San Francisco. ARPANET was launched in 1969.

Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center, the legendary Xerox PARC, was established in 1970; in 1973 its first personal computer—the first personal computer—became operational, with an animated image of Sesame Street's Cookie Monster flashing across its screen.

The IBM Personal Computer was introduced in 1981 and the Apple Macintosh, arguably the first consumer desktop computer, in 1984.

Since then, technological innovation seems to have regressed into a morass of cryptocurrency scams, new ways to invade personal privacy, and robotaxis that collide with emergency vehicles, block traffic and drive themselves into wet cement. (One notable exception: the truly life-saving development of COVID-19 vaccines in record time.)

Warnock and his longtime professional partner, Charles M. Geschke, first collaborated at Xerox PARC. As I reported in my 1999 book about PARC, "Dealers of Lightning," there they worked to create a program to reconcile the incompatible image resolutions of computer screens and laser printers (another PARC invention).

Documents that looked perfect on the screens of PARC's personal computer, the Alto, turned into unintelligible gibberish when printed out. That made a mockery of another PARC innovation, Bravo, a word processing system built on the principle of "what you see is what you get," or WYSIWYG, meaning that the image on the screen could display varied fonts, boldface, shadows, even Russian cyrillic or Japanese kanji characters—and that the same features would appear on a printed page.

Warnock, Geschke and several collaborators finally invented Interpress, through which a printed document appeared exactly as it did on the screen. They then entered the hell of trying to persuade Xerox to integrate Interpress into its laser printers and other typographical products.

The experience prompted them to leave Xerox, joining a vanguard of PARC scientists and engineers who carried PARC's DNA into the outside world, frustrated at the company's inability to market their inventions to businesses and consumers.

"We spent months traveling around to all the divisions within Xerox and back to corporate selling this idea," Warnock would recall. Xerox eventually agreed to make Interpress a component of its entire product line, but refused to announce it until every product could be reengineered to accommodate it, a process that would take years.

Crestfallen, Geschke and Warnock told themselves, "We've spent two years of our lives trying to sell this thing and they're going to put it under a black shroud for another five," Warnock recalled. "You were seeing PCs get announced, and Apples, and it became sort of depressing."

They left to found Adobe. After some false starts they settled on a business plan that would turn Adobe into a billion-dollar company by 1999: the development of an Interpress-like typesetting program. This became Postscript, which was first bundled into Apple printers and soon became the de facto standard for computer printing. (Geschke died in 2021; he and Warnock served as Adobe's co-chairmen until 2017.)

Adobe became known for other aids to desktop publishing and professional imaging, notably Photoshop, which enables photographs to be altered in seemingly infinite ways. Its digital software, including Photoshop and Acrobat, its PDF-producing tool, remains the core of its business, which recorded $4.8 billion in profits on $17.6 billion in sales last year.

Acrobat was an offspring of Postscript. To Warnock's dismay, Acrobat was an unaccountably hard sell.

"Nobody got it," Warnock recounted. In a meeting at IBM, "I explained how it worked, what its advantages were and how, from any application, you could send a completely portable document across platforms. They just sat there in the meeting with blank stares. They had no idea what I was talking about."

Soon, influential users did get it. "The Centers for Disease Control was one of our earliest and most fanatical adopters," Warnock recalled. "They said, 'Do you know how many people's lives we can save by sending these documents out to all of the field offices?'"

Yet most people still "didn't understand how important sending documents around electronically was going to be.... And in 1994, the world wide web hit, and then everybody said, 'Oh, well, you can use Acrobat to send documents.' What a concept!"

Before then, even the Adobe board had toyed with killing Acrobat. "I said, 'There's just no way. This is solving an important problem, and we are going to hang in there until it works.'"

2023 Los Angeles Times.

Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

$4.6 billion acquisition to advance IBM's existing resource optimization, observability and application management offerings, maximize value for clients and drive significant synergies across several IBM growth areas

ARMONK, N.Y., June 26, 2023 /PRNewswire/ -- IBM (NYSE: IBM) today announced that it has entered into a definitive agreement with Vista Equity Partners to purchase Apptio Inc., a leader in financial and operational IT management and optimization (FinOps) software, for $4.6 billion. The acquisition of Apptio will accelerate the advancement of IBM's IT automation capabilities and enable enterprise leaders to deliver enhanced business value across technology investments.

Organizations are digitally transforming their businesses faster than ever, causing IT environments to expand across public and private clouds, with multiple service providers. To manage this dramatic increase in complexity, clients are turning to Apptio's solutions for integrated and simplified visibility into technology spend across hybrid and multi-cloud environments, labor and associated resources. Apptio, together with IBM's IT automation software and it's watsonx AI platform, will help businesses around the world manage and optimize enterprise IT spend and derive tangible financial value and operational improvement.

Apptio is an established, growing and profitable technology business management and FinOps leader, with over 1,500 clients, serving more than half of the Fortune 100. Industry recognized, Apptio partners and integrates with leading companies such as Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform, Salesforce, ServiceNow, Oracle and SAP, consistent with IBM's commitment to an open partner ecosystem.

Apptio empowers enterprise leaders to manage technology spend and direct investments to high-value cloud innovation and digital transformation. The company has three core offerings, all delivered as software as a service (SaaS) – ApptioOne, Apptio Cloudability, and Apptio Targetprocess:

• ApptioOne: Hybrid cloud spend management and optimization capabilities to analyze, optimize and plan IT spend and value. ApptioOne is used to establish repeatable and accurate planning and financial management processes, delivering actionable insights around cost and utilization, while benchmarking against industry peers for continuous optimization.
   
• Apptio Cloudability: Public cloud spend management visibility and optimization capabilities, connecting multi-cloud and SaaS infrastructure with cloud financial management best practices to maximize the value of clients' cloud strategy.
   
• Apptio Targetprocess: Agile investment planning capabilities to align development resources to business outcomes, plan and track value delivery for projects or products.

"Technology is changing business at a rate and pace we've never seen before. To capitalize on these changes, it is essential to optimize investments which drive better business value, and Apptio does just that," said Arvind Krishna, CEO and chairman, IBM. "Apptio's offerings combined with IBM's IT automation software and watsonx AI platform, gives clients the most comprehensive approach to optimize and manage all of their technology investments."

Apptio and the performance optimization and observability capabilities of IBM's IT automation software like Turbonomic, Instana and AIOps, will deliver clients a 360-degree technology business management platform, providing a "virtual command center" for spend management and optimization stretching across their entire technology landscape. In addition, Apptio will bring to IBM $450 billion of anonymized IT spend data, unlocking new insights for clients and partners.

The acquisition of Apptio is a continuation of IBM's deep focus and investment in hybrid cloud and AI and is expected to drive significant synergies across several key growth areas for IBM, including automation, Red Hat, IBM's broader AI portfolio, and IBM Consulting, as well as strong partnership with other leading systems integrators like Accenture, KPMG, Deloitte and EY. IBM will also deliver new innovation by augmenting watsonx with Apptio's anonymized FinOps data. Additionally, Apptio is expected to benefit from IBM's long-established scale and reach, working with clients and partners across more than 175 countries.

"Our customers are evolving to a complex digital-first, hybrid world where technology investments are distributed and decentralized but all innovation must be aligned with clear business outcomes," explained Sunny Gupta, Apptio co-founder and CEO. "We are so excited to be joining IBM and combining our industry leading offerings with IBM's global presence and strong portfolio across AIOps, automation and hybrid cloud offerings."

"We are committed to building resilient enterprise software companies, which has proven to be highly attractive to strategic and financial buyers, as well as public markets," said Robert F. Smith, founder, chairman and CEO of Vista Equity Partners. "Our investment philosophy, value creation strategy, and industry expertise, enables us to identify and partner with companies that have the potential for long-term success. Apptio has transformed how leading organizations optimize their IT spend and performance for better outcomes. We are proud of these shared accomplishments and look forward to seeing Apptio further evolve with IBM."

Apptio will be acquired with available cash on hand. The transaction is subject to regulatory approvals and other customary closing conditions and is expected to close in the latter half of 2023.

About IBM

IBM is a leading provider of global hybrid cloud and AI, and consulting expertise. We help clients in more than 175 countries capitalize on insights from their data, streamline business processes, reduce costs and gain the competitive edge in their industries. Thousands of government and corporate entities in critical infrastructure areas such as financial services, telecommunications and healthcare rely on IBM's hybrid cloud platform and Red Hat OpenShift to affect their digital transformations quickly, efficiently and securely. IBM's breakthrough innovations in AI, quantum computing, industry-specific cloud solutions and consulting deliver open and flexible options to our clients. All of this is backed by IBM's legendary commitment to trust, transparency, responsibility, inclusivity and service. Visit  www.ibm.com  for more information.  

Press Contacts:

Tim Davidson, 914-844-7847
tfdavids@us.ibm.com

Sarah Meron, 347-891-1770
sarah.meron@ibm.com

Photo - https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/2140087/Apptio.jpg
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View original content:https://www.prnewswire.co.uk/news-releases/ibm-to-acquire-apptio-inc-providing-actionable-financial-and-operational-insights-across-enterprise-it-301862799.html