In the name of its Hadoop-based Big Data platform, IBM is buying Carnegie Mellon spin-off and enterprise search house Vivisimo on undisclosed terms.

The Pittsburgh ISV, which has its own search and navigation system, is supposed to be good at "capturing and delivering quality information across the broadest range of data sources, no matter what format it is, or where it resides," providing a "single view across the enterprise." It's all automated and can be used standalone or embedded.

Vivisimo saw all of $5.66 million in funding from 2000 through 2008 according to CrunchBase, including a $4 million A round led by North Atlantic Capital.

It's collected 140 customers in government, the life sciences, manufacturing, electronics, consumer goods and financial services with names IBM can identify with like Airbus, Proctor and Gamble, the Social Security Administration, the Defense Intelligence Agency and the US Air Force and Navy.

Vivisimo's 120 people will join IBM Software when the acquisition closes.

IBM figures Vivisimo will accelerate its Big Data analytics initiatives with advanced federated capabilities and further its "efforts to automate the flow of data into business analytics applications, helping clients better understand consumer behavior, manage customer churn and network performance, detect fraud in real-time, and perform data-intensive marketing campaigns."

It says "Vivisimo's ability to index and search data across multiple repositories is a distinguishing capability, applicable to all industries and clients."

Just last week IBM said it was buying Varicent Software, which automates and analyzes the collection and reporting of sales data and compensation across finance, sales, HR and IT.

Back in February the New York Times said that IBM had spent $14 billion buying up analytic companies over the last five years. HP spent nearly that much buying Autonomy, putting all its eggs in one basket. IBM says it looks for adjacencies to get a return.

IBM estimates that 2.5 quintillion bytes of data are created every day from a variety of sources including sensors, social media and the billions of mobile devices around the world, making it difficult for businesses to navigate and analyze it to improve competitiveness, efficiency and profitability.

IDC estimates the market for Big Data technology and services will grow at an annual rate of nearly 40% to reach $16.9 billion by 2015.

IBM says it's expanded its Big Data platform to run on other distributions of Hadoop besides Apache Hadoop, beginning with Cloudera, a top contributor to the open source Hadoop effort and the first commercializer of Hadoop.

As a result, Cloudera Hadoop clients can now take advantage of IBM's Big Data platform to run complex analytics and build a new generation of software applications. IBM also says that over 100 of its resellers have adopted the IBM Big Data platform.