By Jane Clabby

IBM announced today that they will acquire Vivisimo, a provider of federated discovery and navigation software to help in the analysis of big data. Vivisimo analyzes both structured and unstructured data and can easily and transparently navigate across the enterprise, capturing data wherever it resides without physically moving that data– improving performance and speeding time-to-value..

Vivisimo has 140 clients spanning multiple verticals including government, defense, manufacturing, financial services, consumer goods, and medical and scientific research.  Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory used Vivisimo to “discover, search, and navigate multiple federated data sources to provide the lab’s 4,500 employees with a unified search tool for content, project and expertise information”. The technology will also be instrumental in speeding up processing that will enable Watson to ingest large volumes of data.

According to IBM, IBM’s big data analytics capabilities combined with Vivisimo software will enable a new class of applications that will help businesses better understand consumer behavior, manage customer churn and network performance, detect fraud in real-time, and perform data-intensive marketing campaigns.

Vivisimo’s technology has several unique features that improve its discovery and navigation capabilities.  Accuracy is improved with its position-based index technology and its ability to leverage usage and feedback information. Security features ensure that users only have access to the information for which they are authorized. Vivisimo can scale to trillions of records for quick access to enterprise information throughout the organization. And Vivisimo comes with a broad range of connectors to unstructured as well as structured information sources.

IBM also announced that in addition to supporting open source Apache Hadoop, they will  be expanding their big data platform to run on other versions of Hadoop, starting with Cloudera, making IBM “ the only platform that supports multiple open source distributons.” As a result, Cloudera Hadoop clients can now take advantage of IBM’s big data platform to perform complex analytics and build a new generation of software applications.