IBM’s showing no signs of letting up on its big data shopping spree, announcing its intent to acquire StoredIQ, a company that specializes in ‘big data efficiency’, deciphering large quantities of data and disposing of any information that has “outlived its purpose”.

For StoredIQ, big data doesn’t just mean drawing actionable intelligence from number crunching and analysis – instead it goes beyond that by identifying inefficiencies with its client’s big data, in order to keep things inside the data center neat and tidy.

Don’t be surprised if you haven’t heard of StoredIQ before. It’s a relatively small company that counts just 120 customers at present, but nevertheless the ones it has are not to be sneered at. These include clients in government, finance, healthcare and several major service sectors.

According to IBM, StoredIQ’s ‘lifecycle governance’ software is the perfect system to mesh with its own information lifecycle governance suite of tools, which is designed to help companies lower the cost of storing and understanding their big data. IBM understands there is still a big demand for on-premise storage among some companies, but is also aware of the high costs associated with this practice that come from the constant need to upgrade hardware. As such, by integrating its own big data efficiency suite with that of StoredIQ’s, it might just be able to come up with a viable alternative to cloud-based storage.

StoreIQ’s products possess some unique capabilities that allow it to not just recognize the most valuable data within a network, but also identify exactly where that data is stored and its relationship with critical policies regarding compliance. Administrators set their own parameters, and then StoredIQ can rapidly detect and destroy all unnecessary data in a safe manner.

The software also possesses e-discovery and automated privacy capabilities that allow it to analyze data under its control and provide insights far beyond simple locations and sources. This goes for big data located anywhere within the eco-system, including large databases, networked shares and even emails. Finally, StoredIQ can also identify duplicate data sets and delete these as necessary, and quickly produce reports on large, unstructured data sets whenever it comes across these.

Another benefit that IBM gets out of the deal will be StoredIQ’s small community of solution providers, which could well tie in with IBM’s ambitions to compete in the managed services space.

IBM’s bid to acquire StoredIQ has been confirmed, and is expected to be finalized sometime in Q1 of next year.