IBM Snatches TeaLeaf Analytics

IBM has agreed to acquire TeaLeaf Technology, a vendor that offers customer analytics software.

Big Blue believes the acquisition will close in the second quarter of this year, when IBM thinks it will hugely benefit from the qualitative analytics skills of TeaLeaf, especially because of the mobile capabilities the company can offer.

IBM will be getting itself 450 TeaLeaf customers, 30 of which are Fortune 100 companies, including one of Big Blue’s rivals Dell. TeaLeaf’s technology looks at customers’ websites and mobile interactions to help marketers spot patterns and take action on them.

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“With these new capabilities from Tealeaf, we can not only provide chief marketing officers and other marketing leaders the qualitative insights into how customers actually experience their brands, but show them how to react in real time across marketing, sales and service,” said Craig Hayman, general manager of industry solutions at IBM.

“Tealeaf’s patented technology can be deployed into a business’s current environment with no needed modifications so they begin capturing customer data and delivering optimal experiences immediately,” added Rebecca Ward, chairman and chief executive officer at TeaLeaf.

IBM has been hammering away at its cheque book with a raft of acquisitions so far this year, many aimed at analytics and the Big Data market. Late last month, Big Blue snapped up Vivisimo for some discovery and navigation software.

In January it got its hands on Platform Computing, a provider of technical and distributed computing management software. A month later it bought Worklight, a privately held Israel-based provider of mobile software for smartphones and tablets.

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