ReadWriteWeb

IBM continued its acquisition feast today by gobbling up Clarity Systems, a financial governance software company. It also completed its acquisition of risk and compliance management software company OpenPages. Last week IBM acquired governance software company PSS Systems, and last month it acquired big data company Netezza.

IBM says "These strategic moves further accelerate IBM's business analytics efforts, one of the fastest growing segments in the overall IT industry and a key growth play for IBM." And the company's CFO Mark Loughridge projects business analytics will generate $16 billion in revenue for the company by 2015. But what is business analytics, and how does it differ from business intelligence?

Microsoft announced today that Chief Software Architect Ray Ozzie is stepping down from his position. Although Microsoft does not intend to replace Ozzie, he will assist in transferring his responsibilities during a transition period before focusing on consumer entertainment projects at Microsoft. Ozzie has a long history in enterprise software, having worked for Lotus, IBM, Groove Networks and eventually Microsoft.

Ozzie joined Microsoft in 2005 when the company acquired Groove, which Ozzie co-founded, and turned it into SharePoint Workspaces. Ozzie replaced Bill Gates as Chief Software Architect in 2006. Ozzie shared his cloud-centric view of enterprise collaboration in his now famous Internet Services Disruption memo, pioneered Azure and ran Microsoft's social computing research lab. What does his departure mean for enterprise software?

IBM and the City of Dubuque, Iowa have teamed up to launch the Smarter Sustainable Dubuque Water Pilot Study. This project involves the installation of smart water meters, that with the help of volunteer citizens, will allow the city to collect and analyze data about water consumption trends and patterns. The goal of the study is to demonstrate how informed citizens can help make a city sustainable by encouraging behavioral changes that will result in conservation, cost reduction, and leak repair.

"What our volunteer households are accomplishing is the first step to understanding waste and ultimately the conservation of valuable resources to sustain life quality for generations to come, " says Dubuque Mayor Roy D. Buol.

We wonder if Ray Ozzie ever thought that he would someday looking from Microsoft's executive suite to see IBM release his Lotus Notes creation into the cloud.

That's what IBM did today. Lotus Notes is now as much a cloud platform as it has ever been with a set of new features that have traditionally only been available on-premise. Before we dive into the details of the news, let's look at Lotus Notes from a historical context.

In 1973, David Wooley created PLATO Notes, an online message board. According to Wikipedia "Ray Ozzie worked with PLATO while attending the University of Illinois in the 1970s. When PC network technology began to emerge, Ozzie made a deal with Mitch Kapor, the founder of Lotus Development Corporation, that resulted in the formation of Iris Associates in 1984 to develop products that would combine the capabilities of PCs with the collaborative tools pioneered in PLATO. The agreement put control of product development under Ozzie and Iris, and sales and marketing under Lotus. In 1994, after the release and marketplace success of Notes R3, Lotus purchased Iris. In 1995 IBM purchased Lotus."

IBM announced today that it is acquiring data warehousing company Netezza for $1.7 billion, continuing Big Blue's steady diet of acquisitions. Netezza will complement IBM's more expensive ISAS package and competes directly with the comparably priced Exadata from Oracle.

"Big data and data warehousing are at the core of every analytics problem," says Altimeter Group co-founder and analyst R "Ray" Wang. And Bitcurrent analyst Alistair Croll told us: "A lot of the CIOs I've spoken with recently tell me they feel more and more like a service bureau for their marketing departments. There's just so much information floating around, and chewing on it is hard work." So what does this deal mean for the future of big data in the enterprise?

It may come as a surprise to some but augmented reality and the wide world of sports go way back. Glowing hockey pucks and yellow first-down lines on the football field are just a few of the early examples, but today AR is a part of every-day sports broadcasts. More recently, however, AR has begun to make its way into the live sports experience, and an app recently developed by IBM for the U.S. Open Tennis Championships is an excellent example of this transition.

Google TV is the first major test to determine how cloud computing changes television.

For years we have seen the dichotomy between television and the Internet. In the earlier years, television had scale. The Internet did not.

But now we are in a different era. The massive scale of the cloud now has the power to displace the signal as the way movies, television shows and other forms of media get delivered to the home.

IBM invited a group of bloggers for a day to talk with executives and a visit to the labs. This morning the discussion centered on analytics. This afternoon the conversation still focused on analytics with more emphasis on IBM's larger theme about the "smarter planet."

12- 1 p.m EST: Long discussion about IBM investment. Major focus is on smarter cities and water supplies. IBM is working with non-profits on the Hudson River Sensors have ben deployed to monitor the water supply. The stream computing system examines different sources to understand the dynamics of the river. Temperature, salinity, dissolved oxygen and pollution are all analyzed in real-time. Fish populations are monitored through acoustical data and tracked with radio tagging.

I am at IBM's blogger day at the corporate headquarters in Armonk, New York. Officially it's called the "Smarter Planet Blogger Day." I'm hoping to get some insight into a company with more software than any technology company out there. IBM has made $11 billion in software acquisitions over the past five years and $2 billion in organic investment.

Here are some notes from the first part of the day. We'll post again this afternoon.

8 a.m. EST. Looking at the schedule that tour organizer Erica Topolski put on a Tumblr page. Nice touch.

8:15 a.m.. Bloggers are waiting in the blogger bus. Chatted with Mike Loukides of O'Reilly Radar about Strata, the conference they have planned for February. Topic: big data!

There is this concept of virtual currency in the cloud that we explored back in May. It came from IBM and its use of tokens as a virtual currency for customers to use software in the cloud.

The concept draws on the fundamental belief communities work in a social manner. Each member of the community participates through the exchange of currency that has a specific unit of value.