TheCube with John Furrier, Founder of SiliconAngle and Dave Vellante, Co-Founder of Wikibon, interview Stacy Leidwinger, Senior Director of Product Management – IBM Software Group. Her company recently closed its sale to IBM in June of this year. Vivisimo helps organizations unlock and optimize true business value of all information, regardless of app or source.

Vivisimo, will now be known as Data Explorer and come under the big data portfolio at IBM. The announcement came today. The market and demand for a turnkey solution in big data has been growing like crazy over the last 18 months, and Data Explorer aims to become a solution in the big data space. Stacy described it as the entry point for clients. It helps customers understand, navigate and explore all of its big data assets.  Whether systems like Big Insights, enterprise content from content management (ERP, PLM, CRM), or external information like social media – Data Explorer gives a real time dashboard navigation of the collective data sets.

Stacy aims for Data Explorer (previously Vivisimo) to give its users a tool that affords them the ability to navigate all of that information to use at point of impact. In Lehman’s terms: real-time capabilities of interacting with customer data. Data Explorer can index all of company’s rich assets, and gives a slick user interface that can push content out.

The data lives where it lives, it doesn’t have to be moved.

Data Explorer aims to be a ‘first in the door’ solution – identifying characteristic sets and then start to run analytics. At its disposal is a clustering engine, which dynamically categorizes themes without any preprocessing.

Unstructured data “is our sweet spot,” said Stacy. There are three selling points to the solution in Stacy’s eyes:

• Inability to answer the question: how do you navigate and explore your data assets?
• A great UI and 360 degree view of how the information is being put together, pushing info out to the user
• Taking that 360 and extending it with analytics – really starting to merge the quantitative analysis that might come out of a Big Insights, Cognos, SPSS with the qualitative of the unstructured

John asked Stacy, What is the most exciting thing product wise in the marketplace? Her reply showcases her commitment to big data: “The fact that tomorrow I’ll be talking at the IM keynote, showing the demo of our product, to maybe 2-3 thousand people. It might of taken me a whole year to demo to 3 thousand people, and I did a lot of talking … What we bring is we’ve really focused on what are the business problems that our customers are looking to solve? And I think I’m seeing this evolution where probably the last year or two years there’s been a lot of, lack of a better term, science projects around big data.”

IBM has been a big player in data for a long time, and with the acquisition of Vivisimo and Stacy’s team, they stand to position themselves well as a solution provider for gathering, analyzing and understanding big data, small data… heck, all data. I really like Stacy’s pension for interacting and analyzing the data at point of impact. As a data disciple, that is in fact the Holy Grail.

Watch Stacy’s full interview below, and see here for more video from IBM IOD at Data Week 2012.