IBM recently celebrated its 100 year anniversary, an achievement that can be credited in large part to the company’s ability to identify key trends in a timely manner – from punch cards to mainframes, and now big data.

Today Big Blue is several billion dollars deep into the big data space (and not just because of its work with ASTRON), thanks to in-house initiatives as well acquisitions; the company’s latest buy is Vivisimo.

Terms of the deal were not disclosed, but there are a few details we do have about the Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania-based company. It used to be a part of Carnegie Mellon University, and has raised a total $6 million in funding to date for enterprise search.

Vivisimo offers a platform named Velocity, which aggregates structured and unstructured data from various sources including  the web, and then breaks down the results to specific categories. This catalogued data is made available to the user in the way relevant to the client organization.

Here’s IBM’s take on the deal:

“”Navigating big data to uncover the right information is a key challenge for all industries,” said Arvind Krishna, general manager, Information Management, IBM Software Group. “The winners in the era of big data will be those who unlock their information assets to drive innovation, make real-time decisions, and gain actionable insights to be more competitive.”

Enterprise search has been a big data highlight over the past few days. Before the Vivisimo, news emerged that Attivio had update of its own: the company is looking to make its own big data platform, the Active Intelligence Engine, more user friendly by teaming up with BI vendors. The freshest partnership is the one with QilkTech and two of its partners.