IBM has announced the acquisition of discovery and navigation software provider Vivisimo, and a partnership with Cloudera to expand its Big Data platform.
Pennsylvania-based Vivisimo provides a solution that captures and delivers information to organisations, allowing employees to navigate around the data via a single view across the enterprise. With the acquisition, IBM intends to expand its Big Data analytics initiatives.
Arvind Krishna, GM of Information Management at IBM Software Group, said: “Navigating Big Data to uncover the right information is a key challenge for all industries. The winners in the era of Big Data will be those who unlock their information assets to drive innovation, make real-time decisions, and gain actionable insights to be more competitive.”
In other news, IBM has also announced a partnership with Cloudera to integrate Cloudera's Distribution including Apache Hadoop (CDH) and Cloudera Manager with IBM's Big Data platform, which is based on open source Apache Hadoop.
With the combined technologies from the two companies, IBM intends to help organisations harness the power of Big Data. IBM BigInsights will run on CDH and Cloudera Manager, pushing the limits of high performance, scalability and platform extensibility, said the firm.
Additionally, the solution includes the most widely deployed and feature complete Hadoop platform, BI capabilities (BigSheets, text analytics) and connectors to IBM Netezza, IBM DB2, IBM InfoSphere Warehouse and IBM Smart Analytics System.
Rob Thomas, VP of Business Development at IBM, said: “Big Data is more than a challenge; it is an opportunity to find insight in new and emerging types of data, to make your business more agile, and to answer questions that, in the past, were beyond reach," said. "IBM's platform for Big Data uses technologies like Hadoop to open the door to a world of possibilities, and by partnering with Cloudera, we are empowering our customers with more choices when deploying this game-changing technology.”
Mike Davis, senior analyst at Ovum, believes this is further proof that Big Data is the hottest topic in IT for 2012.
He said: “As predicted in our 2012 Trends to Watch research, vendors are now clearly seeing the benefits of investing in tools to help organisations navigate Big Data. Since its inception, we’ve highly rated the search technology from privately held Vivisimo. 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 will deploy open source software.
“Vivisiomo’s Velocity search compliments IBM’s analytic tools for discovering the information ‘nuggets’ that are often obscured by the rapidly increasing volumes of corporate and associated social media data.”
