This is the follow-up post to the yearly roundup of IBM’s biggest developments in 2011, looking into the company’s drastic expansion of its analytics portfolio in the past 12 months. SiliconANGLE has been covering the particularly notable advancements in big data the Big Blue made all throughout the year.

Picking up from where we left off in the first article, IBM is still very much invested in high-performance computing. What’s interesting is that it’s now starting to leverage the technology to carry out large-scale analytics jobs for clients and produce new offerings.

WellPoint is leveraging Watson to carry out patient diagnosis and other tasks, while actively pursuing new opportunities. Most recently it has teamed-up with a cancer research facility to find new ways of coming up with treatment evaluation using the automated Jeopardy! champion’s computing capacities.

IBM is also making use of Watson. The  Strategic Intellectual Property Insight Platform leverages components from the famous supercomputer to automate a sizable chunk of medical researchers’ jobs from the cloud. The system matches components with all the relevant data that may be needed within a relatively short timeframe.

Moving beyond the medical industry, Big Blue is using big data to improve space research. Scientists at New Zealand’s SKA Industry Consortium use software developed by the company for the same purpose as WellPoint and others: to automate a great deal of otherwise time-consuming tasks.

What stood out the most this year when it comes to IBM’s analytics strategy is perhaps not the collection of new initiatives, but rather the fact it spent about  $1 billion on big data firms in the past two months alone. It has acquired cloud-based supply chain optimizer Emptoris, merchandising analytics SaaS provider DemandTec for $440 million, and before that i2 and Algorithmics.