IBM Thursday inked an agreement to acquire Bluetab Solutions Group, S.L. with an aim to extend its portfolio of data and hybrid cloud consulting services in Europe and Latin America.

After the acquisition, Bluetab will become a strategic part of IBM's data services consulting practice to advance its hybrid cloud and Artificial Intelligence (AI) strategy.

"Our acquisition of Bluetab will fuel migration to the cloud and help our clients to realize even more value from their mission-critical data," said Mark Foster, Senior Vice President, IBM Services and Global Business Services.

The two companies, though, did not disclose financial details of the acquisition deal.

The transaction is subject to customary closing conditions including regulatory clearance and is expected to close in the third quarter of 2021.

Madrid-based Bluetab has partnerships with brands operating in the banking, telecommunications, and energy and utility industries across Spain, Mexico, Peru and Colombia.

"The key to solving data challenges for our clients has been the exceptionally talented and experienced team we have been able to build as well as the value-added accelerators we have developed," said Jose Luis Lopez, Bluetab co-founder.

"We could not be more excited by the opportunity that IBM offers us to continue to grow our team, to build on our accelerators and to help more clients achieve leadership positions by leveraging their data,” added Lopez.

Bluetab enables enterprises to drive more value from their data by transforming their on-premise data and analytics infrastructure to hybrid multi-cloud data platforms using a combination of public cloud providers and technologies including Red Hat OpenShift.

According to Gartner, "the worldwide Data and Analytics services market is forecast at $123 billion in 2020, with a five-year compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 14.6% to reach $232 billion by 2024."