Coremetrics, headed by CEO Joe Davis (pictured), works with customers including Bank of America, Holiday Inn, Victoria’s Secret and Virgin Atlantic.

In a statement announcing the deal, IBM said the acquisition would give it the ability “to help businesses rapidly gain intelligence into social networks and online media sources through a cloud-based delivery model and incorporate this insight into their business processes to create smarter, more effective marketing campaigns”.

IBM said Coremetrics will become part of its application and integration middleware portfolio, and the company’s 230 staff will move with the business.

Terms of the deal were not disclosed but the takeover is expected to be completed sometime during the third quarter of this year.

Coremetrics marks IBM’s third acquisition in the analytics space since its purchase of customer analytics services firm RedPill Solutions in September and the $1bn takeover of predictive analytics software specialist SPSS in October.