International Business Machines (IBM) announced on Monday it has acquired California-based data switch maker Blade Network Technologies for an undisclosed amount.

IBM said the acquisition, which will be finalized in the fourth quarter, aims to bring Blade's switches closer to IBM to optimize systems performance. It described Blade's switches and software as industry-tested, speedier and energy-savers.

IBM and Blade's relationship dates back to 2002. The two companies share clients from the automobiles, telecoms, education, government, health care, defense and finance industries.

Blade became the third acquisition of IBM this year. The US computer giant also bought business analytics firm Netezza Corp. for $1.7 billion last week and risk management firm OpenPages the previous week.

The acquisition of Blade comes as rivals beef up their data center business with similar moves. Network equipment maker Cisco Systems Inc. barged into the data center arena by announcing its first blade servers last year while Hewlett-Packard beat Dell in a bidding war for 3Com Corp. in April.