IBM has bought itself another software maker with the acquisition of Alphablox - a small firm based in Mountain View, California.

Neither company released financial details for the deal, which is expected to close by the end of July. IBM plans to bring Alphablox's analytics software in-house, adding it to the DB2, WebSphere and Rational lines. This acquisition marks the sixteenth software buy IBM has made since 2001.

IBM wants to get its hands on the Alphablox InLine Analytics Suite, which is made up of the Alphaxlox Analytics and Alphablox Alerts products. This software lets customers create their own analytics applications that can be built-in to existing business software.

Or as IBM puts it, "Alphablox software enables customers and business partners to embed analytics - such as customer buying trends - into existing business processes, and makes information available to a wide spectrum of users and applications. As a result, the software helps organizations boost business insight by accessing data from across the enterprise and then enables the presentation of that information to be viewed in a customized way."

IBM wasted little time showing Alphablox its new place. The smaller company's website now points (http://www-306.ibm.com/software/data/db2/alphablox/) to an IBM page for DB2 Alphablox for Unix and Windows. The Alphablox software also works with Oracle, Mircosoft and Sybase databases.

Down the road, IBM plans to build the Alphablox technology into its WebSphere Integration Monitor, WebSphere Business Integration Monitor and Rational toolset products.

While IBM is currently blocking direct access to Alphablox's website, interested types can still dig around on the back pages (http://www.alphablox.com/about/company_background.html). There you'll see that Alphablox also works with BEA, Microsoft, Oracle and Sun Microsystems. At least, it did. ®

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