IBM has recently added $7 billion in its share-buyback plan in order to boost per-share earnings and investor returns. The company will be using these funds for IBM’s new stock repurchase program.  IBM already had $5.2 billion from its previous repurchase authorization, and this new authorization has brought it to $12.2 billion.  This buyback authorization is in sync with IBM’s repurchase strategy.

“The buyback program, given their exceptional cash flow, is one of the key elements of continuing to grow their earnings” per share, said Louis Miscioscia, a Collins Stewart analyst in Boston, who has a “buy” rating on the stock.

IBM has also declared a quarterly dividend of 75 cents a share, which is payable on December 10.  So far, the company’s dividend has increased every year.  And keeping the same record, its dividend increased by 75 cents this year too.

Besides its buyback development, IBM is also pushing several other initiatives across its many interests. A recent one is the use of IBM’s big data technology in Vestas wind turbine crank. Vestas is a Danish wind turbine manufacturer, and will be utilizing IBM’s Firestorm supercomputer that will help former to analyze petabytes of data to enhance its energy output.  This software, created by IBM, will run on the Apache Hadoop software for parallel processing of very large data sets, and will complete large scale analysis in a very short time span.

IBM is further entering into the unstructured data analytics market by offering its Hadoop-based InfoSphere BigInsights tool as service.  The company made this announcement at its Business Analytics Forum today in Las Vegas. As of now, IBM is offering a basic, free version of the new tool along with a for-pay enterprise-level service. Moreover, this Hadoop-based InfoSphere BigInsights tool has helped IBM to gain a competitive edge over its rivals, including Oracle and Microsoft.

“The integration of big data into data warehousing environments is important, but the other constituent is the business processional. How do people who don’t want to learn Pig, program Java, or master Hadoop interact with big data, said Rod Smith, the company’s vice president of emerging Internet technologies. IBM is alone in offering a simple interface like BigSheets as a way for business people to analyze large data sets.”