IBM (NYSE: IBM), which lately has had an open wallet and a penchant for analytics vendors, snagged another one on September 20, as it continued to build out its analytics business through acquisition. The latest is Netezza, a Marlborough, Mass.-based company that makes an analytics appliance.

This comes hot on the heels of last week's announcement that IBM had purchased OpenPages, another Massachusetts company. OpenPages has a specific analytics package designed to help companies identify and manage risk.

The Real Story Group's Alan Pelz-Sharpe said IBM's strategy is clear. "This acquisition further underlines IBM's seriousness in expanding out their analytics business," Pelz-Sharpe said, but he sees it as part of a broader play to make Business Intelligence (BI) a center piece business.

"What I find interesting in their strategy is that 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."

Speaking about the OpenPages purchase in particular, Pelz-Sharpe said, this move should help IBM capture the financial services analytics business, which is particularly concerned about regulatory and compliance issues.

"On the surface at least 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," he said.

Pelz-Sharpe said it would be reasonable to expect some sort of response from Oracle (NASDAQ: ORCL) at some point because analytics is a big business for them, but he says these moves mean Oracle has a ways to go to catch up.

For more information:
- see the Mass High Tech Netezza story
- see the IBM OpenPages press release

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