IBM Acquires Stepzen to Scale AI, Cloud Ambitions

IBM continues its cloud, automation, and AI roadmap with 2023's first purchase

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IBM Acquires Stepzen to Scale AI, Cloud Ambitions
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Published: February 9, 2023

Rory Greener

Rory Greener

This Wednesday, IBM announced its first acquisition of 2023 with the purchase of StepZen, a firm producing low-code GraphQL developer suites for building high-quality digital customer experience platforms.

The move marks another step in IBM’s journey to provide clients with hybrid cloud and artificial intelligence (AI) solutions. The CEO of IBM, Arvind Krishna, is leading the firm’s current technology focus. IBM acquired 30 firms since 2020 to help spearhead its cloud, automation, and AI goals.

The acquisition closed on February 6. The StepZen team and technology innovations will join the IBM Software unit. Previously, StepZen worked with IBM to design database technology services, including IBM Db2, PostgreSQL, and Apache Derby.

StepZen’s team will assist IBM in developing API management, data fabric, and data management CX tools. Moreover, following the launch of IBM API Connect, the StepZen acquisition will help to establish the firm’s AI solutions with GraphQL APIs.

More on Stepzen

StepZen enables users to create GraphQL APIs – a query language for businesses to interact with mission-critical data – for deployment on private clouds and on-premises data centres.

The firm provides a SaaS solution which incorporates a low-code, “declarative programming” structure which reduces downtime with simplified code.

GraphQL APIs enable a Stepzen/IBM client to retrieve customer information from a sales call efficiently.

The GraphQL data infrastructure can pull sales data from a firm’s different CX subsystems. Notably, a GraphQL data system can organise data like customer information, order numbers, and delivery status into one unified suite.

Moreover, Stepzen’s GraphQL API returns core CX sales data in an expected format for delivery across a business. StepZen is an expert in the cloud-scaling of CX data, a trait IBM will use following the purchase.

A report by Gartner indicated that 50 percent of questioned enterprises will use GraphQL in production heading into 2025.

Compared to 2021 forecasts, the 2025 GraphQL prediction is greatly accelerating, with GraphQL usage reaching 10 percent in 2021.

GraphQLs are still an emerging data solution, and despite the system being more accessible for enterprise end-clients to adopt, creating GraphQL services is still challenging for engineers and R&D teams.

StepZen GraphQL expertise could greatly assist IBM in developing next-generation data management solutions.

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