The W2O Group, an alliance of companies that run marketing and outsourced development, has achieved a foothold in the analytics space with the acquisition of Ravel.  Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Ravel is a big data firm best known for GoldenOrb, a graph algorithm execution framework that borrows components from Hadoop and a Google project nicknamed Pregel.  According to a release it has several pending patents in this field, all of which – along with the team that can be credited for their creation – are joining W2O.  Co-founder Steve Blackmon is giving up the title vice president of engineering for ‘director of data sciences,’ and his partner Zach Richardson is becoming The Daily Dot’s CTO.  Apparently the publication is a client of W2O.

“The emerging discipline of Social Commerce and the future of Pre-Commerce will hinge on an organization’s ability to makes sense of their data, and others’, ahead of the competition. Ravel’s talented team and technology will enhance our firm’s ability to identify and predict trends ahead of our peers through historical and real-time data analysis,” said Bob Pearson, President, W2O Group.”

Big data is becoming a good investment now that IT vendors are making use of it to raise the quality of their services and products. The same thought occurred to Canaan Partners and Norwest Venture as well, the two VCs that invested $70 million in a Hadoop-powered satellite startup Skybox Imaging this week.

Skybox Imaging is hoping to monetize space photography by launching better equipped imagery probes into orbit, which will take more and better quality images of the earth below.  These pictures will be fed into Hadoop (presumably more than 1,000 words at a time), producing data that would then be sold to any number of organizations that can make use of it.