"We've invested many billions of dollars in acquisitions to enhance [IBM's Information on Demand product and service line]," IBM software chief Steve Mills said during a teleconference Monday. "It's been a very big investment, far more than the $1 billion we first talked about. We essentially ran through that first billion in six months and have spent several billion more since."

A full $5 billion of that investment went toward this year. At this week's , Mills unveiled and promised to continue spending billions of dollars on technology that helps businesses analyze data in real-time and use that data to mitigate risk and create new business opportunities.

Businesses are investing enormous amounts of money to build intelligence around physical assets, and need better ways to make sense of all the information they've collected, Mills said. Moreover, Mills said that 75% of the world's data comes from replication of existing information. "Think of the cost of replicating information over and over again to all sorts of servers and storage devices," Mills said. "It's a huge opportunity to gain efficiencies."

Among other announcements Monday, IBM provided an update on the , an in-memory database technology resulting from IBM's December 2007 acquisition of a Finnish company called Solid Information Technology. The database accelerates both IBM's own relational databases and those from competitors such as Oracle and Sybase. The next version of solidDB will ship in December and support for Microsoft SQL Server will be available in the first quarter of 2009.

"An industry first, solidDB Universal Cache relies on relational, in-memory database software to accelerate IBM's own DB2 and Informix Dynamic Server, Microsoft SQL Server, Oracle and Sybase, increasing their performance up to ten times," IBM said.