IBM (NYSE: IBM) went on a buying spree in 2010. The first major acquisition came in August, with the purchase of Datacap, a small, Tarrytown, NY-based document management company.

According to Tony White, founder of consulting firm Ars Logica, IBM already had much of Datacap's capability in its Filenet family of products. Nonetheless, picking up Datacap was smart because it allowed the company to branch into the insurance and healthcare verticals, supplement their existing data capture and block the acquisition of Datacap by rivals, said White at the time.

Later that same month, IBM purchased Unica, a marketing and analytics company based in Waltham, Mass., for $480 million. While the underlying technology provided by Unica--which had purchased another web analytics vendor, Coremetrics in June--was a bonus for IBM, most experts suspected IBM's greatest benefit was from the customer list.

In early September, IBM bought OpenPages, a company focused on risk and compliance issues. The business analytics angle was a slight deviation from the other WCM and web-analytics buys. The deal was likely less about technology and more about OpenPages' extensive customer list, but later that month the purchase made a bit more sense.

On Sept. 20, IBM further built its analytics business with the purchase of Netezza, a Marlborough, Mass.-based company that makes an analytics appliance. At the time, Alan Pelz-Sharpe of The Real Story Group explained the IBM strategy that was emerging: "They are intentionally trying to move analytics out of the back office of BI and out into the front office world of performance and risk management."

In a conversation with FierceContentManagement Editor Ron Miller, he added, "It's something that will appeal to IBM's many financial service companies, as combined with the work they have been doing to embed analytics in case management, they are pretty much breaking out on their own in this space." 

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