IBM announced it has signed a definitive agreement to acquire Alphablox Corporation. The acquisition is expected to close later this month. Financial details were not disclosed. Alphablox’s operations will be integrated into IBM’s Information Management software business. Alphablox software enables customers and business partners to embed analytics — such as customer buying trends — into existing business processes, and makes information available to 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. With the acquisition of Alphablox, IBM is strengthening providing developers with the ability to build business applications that will enable them to gain multiple views of real-time information from a variety of data sources. Alphablox software can work with both IBM and non-IBM data sources, including Oracle, Microsoft and Sybase. Alphablox technology will be integrated into IBM’s middleware portfolio of offerings in several areas. www.ibm.com/software/data