IBM said on Monday it will acquire technology spend-management platform Apptio from Vista Equity Partners for $4.6 billion in cash, in the latest deal to bolster its capabilities in cloud and automation.

Shares of IBM were marginally lower in premarket trading. IBM said it will finance the transaction with cash in hand and expects the deal to close in the latter half of 2023.

The deal comes at a time companies are cutting their technology budgets amid challenging macro conditions. IBM cut about 3,900 jobs early this year and reported an under 1 per cent year-over-year increase in revenue in the March quarter.

The acquisition of Apptio, a software-as-a-service business with over 1,500 customers and partnerships with cloud companies from Amazon.com’s AWS to Salesforce, will benefit IBM’s Red Hat business, AI portfolio and its consulting business, the technology giant said.

“Going forward, we are opportunistic (on M&A) and looking for opportunities in the software and consulting space,” senior vice-president Rob Thomas told Reuters.

Century-old IBM is reorienting itself to focus on newer AI and cloud-based offerings.

In 2019, it bought software provider Red Hat for about $34 billion, its biggest acquisition ever, and two years later spun off its IT infrastructure and data-center business Kyndryl Holdings. Last year, the company closed the sale of some of its healthcare-data and analytics assets.

Seattle-based Apptio, which was founded in 2007, helps companies manage and understand their spending on cloud services and offers functionalities such as IT budgeting, forecasting and financial analysis.

Apptio’s revenue was about $233 million in 2018, and is expected to have grown 11-13 per cent compounded annually through fiscal 2022, according to analysts at UBS.

Private equity firm Vista Equity Partners took Apptio private in a $2 billion deal in 2019, about three years after the software company had gone public.