IBM announced the acquisition of Manta Software for an undisclosed amount. Manta is a leading data lineage platform that allows enterprises to understand their data better.
Who is Manta?
Manta was founded in 2015 around the idea that effective data governance hinges on a deep understanding of data’s meaning and a robust stewardship model. Manta’s platform tackles the enterprise data needs for three primary use cases:
- Compliance with industry regulations, combining lineage and governance for a holistic solution.
- Understanding the repercussions of upstream data changes on downstream applications and performing root cause analysis.
- Modernizing applications by recognizing available legacy assets and deciding which tasks to update first to maximize cost and time efficiency.
The Manta platform provides comprehensive visibility into data flows, sources, transformations, and dependencies. These capabilities assist businesses in understanding the data that powers their intelligent systems.
Through Manta’s data lineage features, businesses can ascertain the validity of the data used for their AI models, trace its origins, observe its evolution, and spot discrepancies in data flows.
The capabilities delivered by Manta enable a modernized data governance and privacy framework – precisely what’s required for modern AI systems where ensuring trust in data is paramount.
Analysis
AI is already changing how we all engage with our data. It promises to accelerate digital and data transformation efforts. Enterprises that adopt the technology will unlock new degrees of competitive differentiation. But for enterprises to leverage the power of AI, the technology must meet the stringent requirements of the enterprise–this is what IBM does exceptionally well.
Manta’s data governance capabilities are a natural fit with the safe AI approach that IBM delivers across its full range of watson.x offerings. Manta will supplement and extend the already significant capabilities that IBM delivers, further extending IBM’s lead in addressing the challenges of AI in the enterprise.
Manta isn’t new to IBM. The two companies had an informal partnership for more than half a decade, dating back to when IBM was extending its data governance capabilities with its Information Governance Catalog (IGC), before formalizing an OEM relationship in July 2022. That the companies aren’t strangers will undoubtably help IBM quickly integrate Manta’s technologies into its offerings.
Today’s announcement marks IBM’s eighth acquisition in 2023, and the 30th acquisition since Arvind Krishna became the CEO in 2020, mainly focused on enhancing IBM’s hybrid cloud and AI offerings. Strategic acquisitions allow IBM to move fast to build the capabilities it needs to help enterprises safely benefit from the powerful potential of rapidly evolving AI systems.
The acquisition of Manta is a strong one, strategically positioning IBM to address these emerging data and AI challenges, fostering greater transparency and trust in AI systems. More crucially, it further demonstrates just how seriously IBM takes enterprise AI.
