IBM to Buy StoredIQ for Big Data Expertise

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IBM has announced that it is acquiring yet another firm with “big data” expertise. Big Blue will buy Texas-based StoredIQ for an undisclosed sum.

David Zielenziger with The International Business Times reported, “International Business Machines Corp. (NYSE:IBM), the No. 2 computer company, said it planned to acquire private StoredIQ to deepen its penetration of the market for ‘big data’ products. Financial terms weren’t disclosed, but IBM VP Ken Bisconti said all 50 employees of the 10-year-old company in Austin, Tex., will be retained when the deal closes in the first quarter of 2013.”

Darryl K. Taft from eWeek noted, “IBM has invested more than $16 billion in more than 30 analytics-related acquisitions. In 2012 alone, IBM closed nine acquisitions, including Kenexa, Tealeaf, Vivisimo, Varicent, Worklight, Green Hat, Emptoris, DemandTec and Platform Computing. The StoredIQ acquisition also builds on the 2010 acquisition of PSS Systems and Vivisimo and adds to IBM’s capabilities in rapid discovery, effective governance and timely disposal of data, the company said.”

All Things D’s Arik Hesseldahl added, “IBM will add StoredIQ to its Information LifeCycle Governance Suite, which aims to help companies spend less on the data they accumulate over the years. Data has a bad way of multiplying. If you’ve ever seen an email chain with attachments get sent to lots of people — then re-sent, forwarded and so on — you can pretty easily understand how unnecessary copies of the same data make storing it all so difficult. And if it’s happening on your email servers, it’s happening with other kinds of data, as well. Copies get made, then copies of copies. In time, it becomes unrealistic to sort through it all and just clean it up.”

Dave Courbanou from Channelnomics observed, “IBM’s investments into Big Data technology continues with its intent to acquire StoredIQ, a private Big Data company that can decipher large quantities of data and ‘dispose of information that has outlived its purpose.’ Big Data for StoredIQ isn’t about crunching numbers to produce actionable intelligence; instead StoredIQ ‘big data’ strives to uncover data inefficiencies and keep things neat and tidy in the data center.”