IBM has finally closed its acquisition deal of Netezza, as reported by the company in a statement released today. The company announced its acquisitions plans during late September this year, and closed today at about $1.7 billion.

Netezza is an established player and provider of high-performance analytics in data warehousing appliances. This will greatly help IBM to increase their business performance at much lower cost. As analytics is considered a top priority by over 80 per cent of IT managers, so this deal will provide added strength to gain in all aspect of the business. IBM and Netezza have worked together in the past too and this will form a good basis to focus on delivering workload optimized systems.

"A recent Global IBM Study revealed that 83 percent of CIO’s identified analytics as a top priority.  The combined strengths of IBM and Netezza are a key differentiator at a time when organizations of all sizes are looking to gain more insight from their business information.

"IBM and Netezza have been strategic partners for many years and will continue to focus on delivering workload optimized systems that provide integrated software, servers and storage for analyzing vast amounts of complex data. "

IBM has already invested over $14 billion in 24 acquisitions and successfully expanded its  analytics capabilities. A recent acquisition that we heard about was with BLADE, a Santa Clara based company. The acquisition was done on an estimate amount of $400 million.

Besides acquisition deals, IBM is also taking initiatives to help communities all around the world. As reported in our recent coverage on IBM’s initiatives, the company launched Smarter Cities Challenge and allocated $50 million for smart cities.