Today IBM announced that it was acquiring search vendor Vivisimo for an undisclosed amount, purportedly to boost Big Blue's capabilities in Big Data.

Vivisimo's major strength historically was its ability to federate results from a variety of other search technologies and bundle them together into something useful. Given that IBM has something like half a dozen different search products at its disposal (including Content Analytics née Omnifind, iPhrase, Websphere Portal Search, etc.) this might be an apposite moment for such a move.

Interestingly, in the same press release, IBM also announced a partnership with Cloudera, an organization that has recently been partnering with Oracle on their new range of "Big Data" appliances. This brings access to Cloudera's Apache Hadoop distribution, which provides the muscle for much of the processing required for Big Data scenarios (along with allied Apache projects such as Hive).

Whether these two announcements are connected is not, at least at this stage, clear. What they do show is a measure of public intent from IBM not to let Oracle steal too much of a march on the enterprise market for Big Data and that, despite some comments to the contrary, federated search apparently ain't dead yet...

As always, existing IBM customers should not rush to buy into this latest offering just because it has a new owner.  For a detailed review of Vivisimo's capabilities, consult our Enterprise Search evaluations.