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IBM today announced that it is acquiring StoredIQ, an Austin, Texas-based Big Data storage management software company. The deal’s financial terms were not disclosed.
StoredIQ specializes in data intelligence, e-discovery and information governance and compliance. The company’s offerings provide what it calls “Active Information Management.” StoredIQ’s software can index and analyze unstructured data in-place versus offloading it to a data repository or invoking specialized applications.
The firm’s DiscoveryIQ application, for instance, helps establish a “legal-friendly repeatable workflow” that allows organizations to arrive at legal decisions faster and at lower cost. According to StoredIQ, it’s a capability that could have big ramifications.
“By giving legal teams insight into the data where it lives in the enterprise, they can determine exactly whose data needs to be collected, measure the volume of data relevant to the case, and then collect and preserve the smallest amount of legally relevant data. This knowledge can then be used to make an informed legal decision such as whether to defend or settle a lawsuit,” states the company on its website.
For IBM, StoredIQ is a natural fit for its expanding portfolio of Big Data management solutions. StoredIQ’s software already interoperates with IBM’s Information Lifecycle Governance suite, informed StoredIQ CEO Phil Myers in a company statement.
Having spent billions to grow its Big Data ecosystem and help businesses harness the profit-boosting potential of the technology, the company is now turning its attention to the legal challenges that huge stores of unstructured data can pose for organizations. “CIOs and general counsels are overwhelmed by volumes of information that exceed their budgets and their capacity to meet legal requirements,” said Deidre Paknad, vice president of Information Lifecycle Governance at IBM.
“With this acquisition, IBM adds to its unique strengths as a provider able to help CIOs and attorneys rapidly drive out excess information cost and mitigate legal risks while improving information utility for the business,” added Paknad.
The StoredIQ buy caps a year of a massive Big Data-themed product push and feverish deal making for IBM.
In June, Big Blue kicked off a Smarter Computing initiative called Smarter Storage. Its goal is to help businesses get a handle on exploding storage requirements by driving efficiency across the company’s many storage systems and management software offerings like Storwize V7000 unified disk storage arrays, System Storage SAN Volume Controllers and Tivoli Storage Productivity Center software.
This spring, IBM made waves by embarking on a Big Data acquisition spree. On April 13th, the company announced that it had acquired Varicent, a sales data analytics company whose technology compliments IBM’s own Big Data analytics capabilities.
Later that month, IBM acquired Pittsburgh, Pa.-based Vivisimo, a provider of federated discovery and navigation software for Big Data analysis. IBM used the occasion to announce that it was expanding the reach of the company’s own Big Data offerings by announcing support for Cloudera, an early provider of Hadoop-based systems for businesses.
Pedro Hernandez is a contributing editor at Internet News, the news service of the IT Business Edge Network, the network for technology professionals. Follow him on Twitter @ecoINSITE.
