IBM on Friday said it would join forces with Industrial Development Agency of Ireland to develop new risk management and analytics software for the pharmaceutical, manufacturing and health care industries.

The primary research will be in the areas of risk information extraction and quantification based on both structured and unstructured data. The idea is to give enterprise customers the tools they need to evaluate data in order to plan for a potential labor or supplier dispute, determine optimal policies for patient drug administration and how to make smart investments in energy sources.

Company officials said IBM research scientists based in Zurich and Yorktown Heights, N.Y. will collaborate with technologists and researchers from the University College Cork, IRCSET and the Science Foundation Ireland.

"This collaboration provides IBM the opportunity to explore exciting new areas of risk modeling and management, incorporating new techniques in information extraction, visualization, and optimization that will enable businesses to more effectively manage their operations in the face of uncertainty," Brenda Dietrich, vice president of business analytics and math sciences at IBM Research, said in a statement.

IBM, as well as competitors such as Oracle, SAP and EMC, continue make extensive research and development investments abroad.

IBM originally established a collaborative research facility in Ireland in November 2008 to develop exascale systems used to solve complex business and scientific problems for companies and government agencies.