IBM has released a suite of new enterprise analytics tools designed to predict the future.

According to the company, the suite uses the historical behavior of a company’s infrastructure to determine how it will behave down the line. “We’re taking the notion of monitoring — and doing analytics on top of it,” Scott Hebner, IBM vice president of market strategy, told Wired. “You go from being proactive to preemptive.”

The new solution includes tools from the IBM WebSphere and Tivoli Analytics families.

A power company, for example, could predict grid issues based on past usage metrics as well as current grid sensor data and outside factors like the weather. After crunching these various metrics, the system could notify when technicians should shift resources to prevent an overload.

The release is part of IBM’s larger efforts to help businesses analyze unstructured data. In the last six years, according to Hebner, the computing giant has spent over $14 billion in acquiring 25 different analytic outfits, working to predict everything from flooding in Texas watersheds or which patients are most at risk in a hospital.

It’s not an unusual strategy. HP completed the purchase of British analytics firm Autonomy on Monday for $12 billion, and Oracle announced its Big Data Appliance at OpenWorld this past week, offering to analyze unstructured data via the open source Hadoop platform, a technology widely tipped to reinvent the enterprise.

Photo: IBM