Big Blue landed a big contract with the U.S. Air Force, through which it will provide the latter with its smarter buildings software.

Not surprisingly the Air Force has a lot of real-estate, and they have to manage it responsibility in order to comply with Presidential Executive Orders. The total amount of assets accumulates to buildings and other infrastructures occupying roughly 626 million square feet across 170 locations. In addition, there are also some 100 million square yards of airfield pavement to be maintained, as well as the 10 million acres used by Active Duty, Reserve and Air National Guard personnel.

The not so inspiringly-named Air Force Office of the Civil Engineer plans on administrating all that using the IBM TRIRIGA software, which helps identify areas that can be further optimized by analyzing all the relevant data. The USAF will use it to reduce power consumption across its thousands of buildings, streamline the supply chain and carry out a number of other tasks on an equally massive scale.

“Having the right data at the right time is essential for U.S. Air Force personnel,” said George Ahn, vice president of Enterprise Asset Management, IBM.  “IBM TRIRIGA infuses a new level of intelligence to physical infrastructures that will enable U.S. Air Force to make the timely and critical decisions about their assets that is essential to the success of their operations.”

IBM has a very strong ‘alternative’ IT portfolio, in fields such as green development and ‘smart’ public infrastructure. This resulted in a number of rather interesting projects and case studies that have been published throughout the past few months, such as the company’s work with the EU to increase household pollution awareness.

The tech titan has been pushing even harder into the analytics space. Towards the end of 2011 it spent over $1 billion on several big data acquisitions, including the public sector-targeted i2.