IBM Completes Acquisition of Vivisimo

IBM today closed on its acquisition of Vivisimo, a provider of federated discovery and navigation software.

Approximately one month after the initial announcement, Big Blue continues to beef up its big data strategy, which the company says will be a dominant part of its planned roadmap through 2015. It's estimated that $100 million went toward research and development in analytics last year.

According to Arvind Krishna, general manager of information management at IBM Software Group, the Vivisimo acquisition "advances IBM's big data capabilities, helping clients uncover new data and combine it with existing information assets for analysis that leads to smarter business decisions."

Vivisimo had been uniquely positioned in the eyes of IBM for its data navigation and information management capabilities; Vivisimo this spring launched a mobile version of its Customer eXperience Optimization (CXO) solution to increase opportunities for cross-sell and upsell for customer-facing professionals by strengthening customer satisfaction and loyalty. Among Vivisimo's service base are 140 clients in government, life sciences, manufacturing, consumer goods, and financial services.

IBM's move to pick up Vivisimo, which added 120 employees to the IBM Software Group, followed its conclusion of an acquisition of Varicent last week, a software company that applies big data analytics to incentive compensation and sales performance management. IBM's analytics-centered acquisition spree did not end with Vivisimo or Varicent; the company recently picked up DemandTec, Cognos, TeaLeaf Technologies, and Algorithmics.

Information technology market research firm IDC released a report this March forecasting the growth of the big data technology and services market from $3.2 billion in 2010 to $16.9 billion in 2015.

"Major IT vendors are offering both database solutions and configurations supporting big data by evolving their own products as well as by acquisition," said Dan Vesset, program vice president, Business Analytics Solutions at IDC, in a statement about the report. "At the same time, more than half a billion dollars in venture capital has been invested in new big data technology."

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