Telecommunications giant CenturyLink Inc. has swooped to make its second major acquisition of the week, buying up Big Data analytics provider Cognilytics. It comes just days after CenturyLink snapped up DataGardens, which offers a disaster-recovery-as-a-service product.

CenturyLink has made no secret of its desire to reinvent itself as a cloud-based data services company, and has made a number of key acquisitions in the field in recent years. It’s shopping spree has seen it buy up data center and hosting company Savvis Inc. back in 2011 for $2.3 billion, as well as AppFog, a Portland-based Platform as a Service, and also Tier 3, a Seattle-based infrastructure as a service (IaaS), platform and advanced cloud management company based on Cloud Foundry. More recently, CenturyLink has been linked with a move to acquire web hosting provider Rackspace Inc., although nothing has yet materialized.

Today’s acquisition seems to be an attempt by CenturyLink to fill in some of its strategic gaps. Cognilytics offers Big Data visualization and analytics tools that enterprises can run on their own infrastructure. It implements both Hadoop and SAP’s HANA platform. In light of the former’s growing popularity, this should give CenturyLink a direct avenue to some major enterprise customers.

CenturyLink’s Girish Varma, president of global IT services and new market development, told VentureBeat the plan is to make Cognilytics available as a cloud-based service. It won’t be available immediately, but in the meantime Varma said he hopes Cognilytics will function “an on-ramp to cloud services.”

Cognilytics will also provide CenturyLink with a pretty steady income stream too. “We’re trying to grow revenue rapidly, and given we’re already an $18 billion business, we’re trying to pick areas where you can accelerate growth pretty fast and it moves the needle,” added Varma.

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