IBM (NYSE: IBM) yesterday announced it will acquire Vivisimo, a Pittsburgh-based firm that helps large organizations access and analyze enterprise data. IBM also announced that its big data platform will now run on Cloudera’s distribution of Hadoop.
The announcements reinforce IBM’s growth strategy of seeking business analytics and optimization opportunities. IBM is under an aggressive acquisition plan that includes investing $20 billion through 2015 in buying companies around the globe. Financial terms for the Vivisimo acquisition were not disclosed.
In a recent exclusive interview with RCR Wireless News, Marcelo Spaziani, VP for Latin America of IBM’s software group, said that most of IBM’s acquisitions will be in the software area. In 2010, software accounted for for 22% of IBM’s total revenues and 44% of its total profits. IBM expects that segment to account for 50% of its profits by 2015.
The market for big data technology and services will grow at an annual rate of nearly 40% to reach $16.9 billion by 2015, according to estimates by IDC, which analyzes industry trends.
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“As predicted in our 2012 Trends to Watch research, vendors are now clearly seeing the benefits of investing in tools to help organizations navigate big data,” said Mike Davis, a senior analyst at Ovum. “Since its inception, we’ve highly rated [Vivisimo’s] search technology. Cloudera is respected for providing not only a distribution of the Open Source Hadoop platform for big data, but also for delivering the support, professional services, and training that enterprises require before they deploy open source software.”
Vivisimo’s Velocity search complements IBM’s analytic tools for discovering information “nuggets” that are often obscured by the rapidly increasing volume of corporate and associated social media data, Davis said. Its software captures and delivers information across a broad range of data sources, locations and formats.
Combining the two companies’ big data analytics capabilities will help automate the flow of data into business analytics applications, help clients better understand consumer behavior, manage customer churn and network performance, detect fraud in real-time and perform data-intensive marketing campaigns, IBM said in a statement.
Vivisimo has about 140 government and corporate customers. Clients include, the U.S. Air Force, U.S. Social Security Administration, U.S. Navy, Defense Intelligence Agency, Airbus,Procter & Gamble, Bupa, and LexisNexis among others. Approximately 120 Vivisimo employees will join IBM’s Software Group.
