Big Blue gets Bigger. Image: Chris Dag/Flickr

IBM has ventured even deeper into the world of “Big Data” with its acquisition of Platform Computing, a Canadian software outfit that builds tools for managing the large computing clusters so often used to crunch the vast amounts of unstructured data generated by modern businesses.

Platform specializes in the use of Hadoop, an open source software platform based on Google’s backend infrastructure. “A number of the Hadoop vendors are not that deep. But Platform Computing is,” Jim Kobelius, an analyst with research outfit Forrester, told Wired, before ...