Watsonx
IBM announcement the acquisition of Manta Software for an undisclosed amount. Manta is a leading data tracking platform that helps businesses better understand their data.
This acquisition aims to enhance IBM’s watson.x AI offerings, in line with the growing need for trust and transparency in AI-based products.
Ensuring safe AI
As businesses integrate AI into their operations, ensuring data quality and explainability becomes crucial. IBM validated this concern earlier this year with its CEO Study 2023who highlighted that concerns about data lineage or provenance are the main barriers to the adoption of generative AI.
IBM is equipping its watson.x AI and data platform with a comprehensive end-to-end AI and governance process that applies across the entire data model lifecycle to address concerns raised by businesses. IBM’s approach ensures that potential customer risks are managed and mitigated directly within watson.x.
While secure AI is built into almost every element of watson.x, much more can be done. Earlier this month, for example, IBM addressed model security with the release of its Granite business foundation models.
IBM’s acquisition of Manta takes IBM even further into the realm of secure AI.
Who is Manta?
Manta was founded in 2015 around the idea that effective data governance relies on a deep understanding of the meaning of data and a robust management model. Manta’s platform addresses enterprise data needs for three primary use cases:
- Compliance with industry regulations, combining traceability and governance for a holistic solution.
- Understand the impact of upstream data changes on downstream applications and perform root cause analysis.
- Modernize applications by recognizing existing assets available and deciding which tasks to update first to maximize cost and time efficiency.
The Manta platform provides complete visibility into data flows, sources, transformations and dependencies. These capabilities help businesses understand the data that powers their intelligent systems.
With Manta’s data tracing capabilities, companies can verify the validity of the data used for their AI models, trace its origins, observe its evolution, and spot gaps in data flows.
The capabilities Manta provides enable a modernized data governance and privacy framework – precisely what is required for modern AI systems where ensuring trust in data is paramount.
The analyst’s point of view
AI is already changing the way we all interact with our data. It promises to accelerate digital and data transformation efforts. Companies that adopt this technology will unlock new degrees of competitive differentiation. But for businesses to harness the power of AI, the technology must meet stringent business requirements – this is what IBM does exceptionally well.
Manta’s data governance capabilities are a natural fit with the secure AI approach that IBM delivers across its watson.x suite of offerings. Manta will complement and extend the already significant capabilities offered by IBM, strengthening IBM’s lead in solving AI challenges in the enterprise.
Manta is not new to IBM. The two companies have had an informal partnership for more than five years, dating back to when IBM was expanding its data governance capabilities with its Information Governance Catalog (IGC). The relationship spanned engineering and commercial functions. The two companies are not strangers, which should help IBM quickly integrate Manta’s technologies into its offerings.
Today’s announcement marks IBM’s eighth acquisition in 2023 and 30th acquisition since Arvind Krishna became CEO in 2020, primarily focused on enhancing IBM’s hybrid cloud and AI offerings. Strategic acquisitions enable IBM to move quickly to develop the capabilities it needs to help businesses securely benefit from the powerful potential of rapidly evolving AI systems.
The acquisition of Manta is a strong acquisition, strategically positioning IBM to address these emerging data and AI challenges, driving greater transparency and trust in AI systems. More importantly, it demonstrates how seriously IBM takes enterprise AI.
Disclosure: Steve McDowell is an industry analyst and NAND Research an industrial analytics company that engages or has engaged in research, analysis and consulting services to numerous technology companies, which may include those mentioned in this article. Mr. McDowell does not have any stock ownership interests with any company mentioned in this article.