On Thursday, International Business Machines Corp. (IBM) announced its acquisition of the closely-held flash memory designer Texas Memory Systems (TMS); and revealed that it plans to acquire more companies in the storage industry in future.

While the financial terms if the IBM-TMS deal remained undisclosed, IBM's Bob Cancilla - the company's VP for storage systems - said that the purchase of TMS underscores IBM's ambitions to provide a more complete storage system, as compared to its rivals, by assembling the components via acquisitions of smaller companies.

With Houston-based TMS is chiefly known for its RamSan shared rackmount devices and PCIe cards, JP Morgan Chase and Co. analyst Mark Moskowitz said that IBM - which is based in Armonk, New York - will apparently use the TMS technology in the products which it sells to customers who either manage data centers or analyze vast amounts of data.

According to Brian Truskowski, IBM systems storage and networking general manager, the offerings of TMS are a perfect complement to the "smarter computing" which IBM promotes as a means to enhance the performance as well as efficiency of technology networks.

Meanwhile, noting that IBM plans more storage acquisitions after the TMS takeover, Cancilla said: "It's not the end of our acquisition phase. We've been on an acquisition phase for the past four or five years, and this (TMS) was one of the missing pieces."