Stephen Lawson/IDG Big Blue kept its checkbook open this week buying AI-based application and network-performance management vendor Turbonomic for an unconfirmed estimate of $2 billion. The acquisition is the eleventh hybrid-cloud and AI-focused buy since Arvind Krishna became IBM CEO in 2020. "Hybrid cloud and AI are the two dominant forces driving change for our clients and must have the maniacal focus of the entire company,” he said at that time. The Economic Times and Reuters said the deal was worth between $1.5 billion and $2 billion and would make it the largest since IBM grabbed Red Hat for $34 Billion in 2019. Turbonomic’s Application Resource Management (ARM) and Network Performance Management (NPM) tools assess and manage the performance of everything from applications and containers to virtualization, cloud, and on-prem compute, storage, and network resources.