IBM To Buy Adobe Workfront Business Of Rego Consulting

The business will join IBM iX, which is part of IBM Consulting, the renamed IBM Global Business Services.

IBM plans to buy the Adobe Workfront consulting unit and assets of Rego Consulting to boost the customer and experience transformation group within IBM’s consulting business. The acquisition is expected to bring new capabilities to IBM around Adobe Experience Cloud, Creative Cloud and Document Cloud.

The business will join IBM iX, which is part of IBM Consulting, the renamed IBM Global Business Services, according to an IBM statement Tuesday. This is IBM’s 17th acquisition since Arvind Krishna became CEO in April 2020. Financial terms for the deal were not disclosed.

The deal also shows continued investment from IBM in its internal services business leading up to the spin-off of IBM’s managed infrastructure service business next month. The managed infrastructure services business will be an independent publicly traded company called Kyndryl.

“This acquisition will deepen IBM iX’s ability to not only help clients design and deliver personalized customer experiences powered by Adobe Experience Cloud, Creative Cloud and Document Cloud,” according to the statement, “but also transform their marketing operations to support these experiences, connecting strategy to delivery, integrating people and data across the enterprise on one collaborative platform.”

[Related: IBM CEO Arvind Krishna’s 10 Boldest Statements From Best Of Breed 2021]

IBM Consulting Senior Vice President Mark Foster told CRN in a recent interview that his segment of the Armonk, N.Y.-based tech giant has its eye on organic growth and growth through acquisition. He said his focus is on Gold and Platinum partners of organizations IBM wants to further partner with in key regions worldwide where IBM also sees growth potential.

Foster identified Adobe, Salesforce, SAP, Workday and ServiceNow as examples of independent software vendors that IBM Consulting wants to grow its relationships with. Foster called acquisitions “a durable part of our business strategy.”

This year, IBM unveiled the acquisitions of European Salesforce partner Waeg and Milwaukee-based Salesforce partner 7Summits. In November, it acquired Chicago-based SAP partner TruQua Enterprises.

“We want to partner with those companies that are growing and doing all that work because we can be a natural integration partner for them,” he said. “In a world where there‘s a real shortage of people who can apply this stuff at scale in the global enterprise, deal with the complexity, that’s something that we see as an opportunity, too.”

The acquisition continues IBM’s spending spree. Other acquisitions this year include DevOps and Kubernetes startup BoxBoat and business process automation software company myInvenio.

Adobe Workfront has named Rego a Partner of the Yearfor the past two years, according to the IBM statement. Rego, founded in 2007, is based in Centerville, Utah. Rego’s other partnerships include CA Technologies and Apptio, according to its website.

Adobe bought Workfront in December for $1.5 billion to bring Workfront’s work management platform for helping marketers manage content, plan and track marketing campaigns, and execute workflows to the Adobe Experience Cloud.