[Techtaffy Newsdesk]

IBM has signed a definitive agreement to acquire Vivisimo, a provider of federated discovery and navigation software that helps organizations access and analyze big data across the enterprise. Vivisimo is a privately held company based in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Upon the closing of the acquisition, approximately 120 Vivisimo employees will join IBM’s Software Group. IBM will incorporate Vivisimo technology into its big data platform. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Arvind Krishna (General manager, Information Management, IBM Software Group): 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.

IBM estimates 2.5 quintillion bytes of data are created every day from a variety of sources including sensors, social media, and billions of mobile devices around the world, making it difficult for businesses to navigate and analyze it to improve competitiveness, efficiency, and profitability. IDC estimates the market for big data technology and services will grow at an annual rate of nearly 40 percent to reach $16.9 billion by 2015.

Vivisimo has more than 140 customers in industries such as government, life sciences, manufacturing, electronics, consumer goods and financial services. Clients include Airbus, U.S. Air Force, Social Security Administration, Defense Intelligence Agency, U.S. Navy, Procter & Gamble, Bupa, and LexisNexis among others.

IBM’s big data platform is based on open source Apache Hadoop. IBM is expanding its big data platform to run on other distributions of Hadoop, beginning with Cloudera.