International Business Machines Corp. is buying data company Truven Health Analytics Inc. for $2.6 billion, in a bid to expand its already considerable presence in the health-care industry. The deal will double the size of IBM’s Watson Health business unit to 5,000 employees as the company adds new technology services to sell to doctors and hospitals.

“We’re now deeply embedded in the health-care system,” said John Kelly, IBM’s senior vice president of Solutions Portfolio and Research. IBM has been on a health-care spending spree in the past year. It has doled out more than $4 billion to acquire medical-technology companies. With Truven, as with a number of other recent IBM acquisitions, the prize is data, which IBM will use to improve its Watson artificial-intelligence system, Mr. Kelly said. “We’ve been systematically putting together the platform and the underlying data,” he said, aiming “to reduce costs and improve outcomes.”

Src: http://www.forbes.com/